Daniel Finkelstein, or the ‘Fink’ as he likes to be known, is the ‘Comment Editor’, of the ”The Times”; although his Times column is notorious for having nothing much to comment upon and for trivialising just about anything.  He is also an advisor/contributing editor to Editorial Intelligence.

More or less
What will all the companies funding Editorial Intelligence be getting for their money? Finkelstein has the extreme habit of reproducing material from the web while denouncing it as the domain of nutters; but he is more adept at advancing concepts such as:

“…the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers puts up £9,000 … to finance a Muslim extremist to travel to Britain and speak at a conference.” [1]

This article  ‘Politeness in the photocopier queue is why we’re losing the War on Terror’ holds up this Orwellian gem for us to admire:

“It is always difficult to counsel that we should understand less, be less curious. Yet in the War on Terror, to understand less is to comprehend more.”

So its the usual on Israel:

“Israel, always controversial, is now commonly talked about as if it were a pariah state.”

For Finkelstein that is an unbelievable remark about the land of milk and honey.  What can you say to someone with their fingers in their ears, but the problem is that people like Finkelstein have their fingers in our ears too. Recent research by Greg Philo indicates that media, particularly television, coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict tends to reflect Israeli perspectives, while leaving most viewers alarmingly ill-informed:

“The result of this approach is that there is almost nothing on the news about the history or origins of the conflict and viewers are extraordinarily confused. Many believed that the Palestinians were occupying the occupied territories or that it was basically a border dispute between two countries who were trying to grab a piece of land which separated them. The great bulk of those we interviewed had no idea where the Palestinian refugees had come from – some suggested Afghanistan, Iraq or Kosovo.”[2] 

But for Finkelstein to take this line of thought on board would be to ‘comprehend more’. He was in a huff because editors were following Section 11 of the BBC’s editorial guidelines which read: “The word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term.”  For Finkelstein understanding is the last thing we want, he wants good old-fashioned jingoistic encouragement: “What is this, if not a disastrous loss in confidence?”  The tone is of an armchair US drill-sargent shouting ‘there’s a war to be won here people and for that we need an enemy — now go out and find one!’  Meanwhile he’s off to the football.

Too close to the terrorism industry himself (as an amateur propagandist) he has not caught on that this stuff cuts both ways: that many people might refer to Israel as historically a terrorist state, citing the history of David Ben gurion, the Stern Gang, founded by terrorists, the killing of British soldiers and so on.

We are reminded by Finkelstein that he is Jewish almost as many times as the great Jackie Mason, who rather fittingly said: “It’s no longer a question of staying healthy. It’s a question of finding a sickness you like”.  For Finkelstein is the sickness Muslim baiting? Take this example:

“…The extraordinary decision of the supposedly mainstream Muslim Council of Britain that they are unwilling to attend this week’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz did not attract as much media attention as I thought it would and feel it should have. The council should be more concerned than I am about this, because it suggests strongly that most of the press have given up expecting any better from them. I retain my capacity for amazement and dismay. It is a disgraceful thing to have decided.”[3]

Sadly Finkelstein would be lost without the word ‘terrorist’ and the bombing of the twin towers provided a new impetus to his attack on the Palestinians — or ‘America’s enemies’ as he portrays them, here using the ventriloquism of the anonymous source:

“It is Israel that for many years now has been fighting America’s war, the democratic world’s war. For many years Israel has faced almost daily attack from the same sort of people who attacked the World Trade Centre, indeed perhaps from the hijackers themselves. What these extremists hate about Israel is not its appropriation of a tiny sliver of Arab land, it is the sitting of a Western style, non- Islamic democracy in the Middle East.”  [4]

Gaza is such tiny sliver of Arab land its hard to get those tanks and bulldozers through the streets and of course the West Bank is the spoil of war. But can the same suicide bombers strike twice?

For Finkelstein its permanent war: “There will be peace in the Middle East only if, first, there is victory in the war against terrorism.”  In a competitive marketplace Finkelstein’s writing has to fit in with the more rabid stuff that the Israeli state encourages — a mild expression of which is arguing that Anti-Semitism, comes in the guise of anti-Zionism.  This is extended by front groups such as The Anti-Defamation League , which hold that a modern and common form of anti-Semitism is the statement that Jews claim that all criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitism [5], yet it does not work the other way: Arafat is still the father of modern Arab terrorism and the Palestinian people (even the unborn) are its enthusiastic supporters. 

And when not sickeningly baiting Muslims, there’s a fine retail in puffery:

“Tony Blair’s attraction to the music and the glamour of the rock world is a central reason why he has been such a great political success and understands so well the country he is leading.[...] The opening up of popular culture to anyone, the strength of American influences, the rejection of a fake Old Left traditionalism in favour of an accessible, popular commercial product, the overwhelming triumph of rock and pop music over all its rivals, all these things have helped to define modern Britain.” [6]

Although Finkelstein practically claims to have discovered the web he will suffer from the fact that all his work has been collated onto sites such as Byliner. That’s the huckster’s nightmare: compare and contrast: just see how much of him you can stand before you run fleeing from your computer.

Two nanoseconds eh? well here’s the Finkelstein formula anyway: meaningless tease intro, glance at what every other commentator is doing and slag off in hypocritical manner, decry so and so who has amassed meaningless stats, adopt this, refer to whatever is at hand: book/web/tea cup/ meaningless aphorism.  Twist at the end: a variant on: ‘pundits get it wrong most of time’.  Of course that would all have to be seasoned with Finkelstein’s own brand of pet hates, bias and bigotry.

One particular episode took a 1000 word preamble to say:

“So, I promised you a definitive answer. When will Tony Blair resign? Will the Conservative Party win the next election? Is there another big Cabinet reshuffle on the way? And will Charles Kennedy survive until next summer? I haven’t the slightest idea. And neither does anyone else.” [7]

Demonstrating his own ignorance is one thing but projecting it on to others? One thing to do the next time he is on television is to observe the amount of time it takes before he alienates everyone around him — but why does he appear so often, why do the Times pay him for writing thin nonsense? He is not in the role of ‘the man-we-love-to-hate’: that epithet is somewhat abridged…

Mylroie — Perle before swine

But you won’t find his wonderfully accurate, brilliantly titled “The twin towers trail leads to Saddam by Daniel Finkelstein, The Times, 3rd October 2001” on the web — all links lead to nowhere.  Which is a pity because it shows the Finkelstein at his best: serving his masters.  He became (conveniently) obsessed with laundering what was termed “The Laurie Mylroie thesis”: an attempt to established Iraq’s involvement in the 1993 WTC bombing, which was given much publicity in the US, and then found its way via Finkelstein to The Times, when propaganda linking Iraq to the bombing of the twin towers was required in selling the war.  The job was to bring The Laurie Mylroie thesis up-to-date in a kind of ‘nevermind the quality feel the width’ style:

“…while we may be confident that Osama bin Laden was involved in the latest World Trade Centre attack, we cannot be remotely confident that he and his network acted alone.  An attack of this complexity would have required active state sponsorship.  This leads to the second point — the most dangerous state sponsor of terror is Saddam Hussein.  The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is right to contemplate a new war against him.”

Finkelstein extended this into somewhat familiar Palestinian territory: ”From the moment that the first of the 1993 bombers, a Palestinian with links to the PLO, was arrested, idiotically attempting to reclaim the deposit on the rented van he had blown up, the FBI seemed convinced that this was merely a criminal matter. Since then the extraordinary investigative efforts of Laurie Mylroie, an American academic, have strongly suggested otherwise.”

Here he sums up: “Mylroie argues that the original plot was infiltrated by Iraqi agents, who later disappeared, leaving the naive organisers to shoulder the blame. Her most important contribution has been to trace the movements of one agent, Ramzi Yousef, from his entry into America until his arrest almost two years after the bombing.  Giving in to such pressure would be to repeat history’s mistake. Even the author of the Powell doctrine himself may be ready to agree. Whatever its role in the latest atrocity, Iraq is clearly a sponsor of international terrorism. The evidence that it is assembling biological, chemical and other weapons of mass destruction is overwhelming. Its willingness to invade its neighbours and lay waste to countries is already proven.”

You would think that emphasis on ‘invade its neighbours’ bit might have triggered off some reflection but… ‘overwhelming’, well yes for those paid to think so but as for Colin Powell and the rest of the world…? And why bother keeping it on the web now that it has served its purpose.  Everybody makes mistakes — but sadly this was not a one off for Finkelstein.

Ramzi Yousef

The Times (October 29, 2001) saw his obsession about the Ramzi Yousef story (planted to encourage the carnage) give us Finkelstein the conspiracy theorist enraptured as the CIA visited Wales.

“It explains, for instance, what the former CIA Director James Woolsey was doing last month tramping round a college in Swansea. Woolsey believes that Iraqi Intelligence organised the 1993 World Trade Centre attack. A man calling himself Ramzi Yousef has been jailed for the crime and Woolsey wants to prove that he is an Iraqi agent. In court, Yousef’s claim that he was Abdul Basit Karim, a Kuwaiti who had studied in Swansea, was accepted by most. No one cared much who he was, as long as he was found guilty.”

Leaving aside that last line: the difficulties with his/the neo-Con’’s story on Yousef has been alluded to by others:

“…most theories closely tying Yousef to the government of Iraq tend to involve an amount of misdirection and arcane identity switching that’s extreme even by the labyrinthine standards of international terrorism. The connection has never been proven.” [8]

The Mylroie book, Study of Revenge, was reissued post 9/11 and the CIA’s Woolsley was a chief backer. [9]

Mylroie was an apologist for Saddam’s regime, but reversed her position upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.  In ‘Study of Revenge’ she acknowledges Richard Perle and John Bolton and the staff of the American Enterprise Institute for their assistance.  Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Vice President Cheney’s (not entirely untarnished) chief of staff, gave “generous and timely assistance.” And Paul Wolfowitz “was instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge”, his then-wife is credited with having “fundamentally shaped the book,” while of Wolfowitz, she says: “At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult.” [10]

Having blurbed Mylroie’s first book as “wholly convincing,” Richard Perle now says that “not everything she says is convincing” and that Mylroie’s thinking was “not very important” to the development of his own views on Iraq. But, at the same time, Perle continues to praise Mylroie’s investigative skills, even saying she should be put in charge of “quality control” at the CIA.  This article also mentions that the Woolsey Welsh trip was apparently sanctioned by Wolfowitz. 

Commercial break here: Should you want to book any of these people: Michael ‘Yellowcake’ Ledeen, Richard ‘consulting fees’ Perle, Richard ‘Team B’ Pipes, Laurie “Armchair Provocateur” Mylroie, James ‘World War IV’ Woolsey and many more: try Benador Associates.

The trouble with this gang is that they are rather too up for hire.  As is Finkelstein one fears.  He provided Saddam torture and WMD-constructing Iraqi scientist stories (rolled in to one) as if to order:

“….Saddam Hussein is a murderer for whom human life means nothing, that he is determined to build weapons of mass destruction and has come close to doing so, and that he harbours terrorists who conspired to destroy the World Trade Centre. They also show that while Saddam is cunning and driven, we have been pathetically weak and naive in our dealings with him. In other words, they show that I may be deeply concerned about Saddam, but I’m not bonkers.”

Finkelstein’s mother was in Belsen, although he has written that: “My mother left Belsen in a very rare prisoner exchange.”[11] But one wonders if there is still an issue with Germany: “German Intelligence reports that he is also at work on a new class of chemical weapons, with missiles capable of reaching Europe. German companies have been delivering to Baghdad material necessary for the production of poison gas.”[12]

There’s no mention of the cream of his beloved Tory party enabling the selling to Saddam of a huge enormous sci-fi space gun which might as well have had ‘Israel here we come’ written on the side but:  “By the time of the Gulf War, having travelled all over the world on illegal shopping trips for nuclear spare parts, Hamza had helped Saddam to build a crude device. Only the fact that it was too big to attach to a missile prevented Saddam from being able to fire it at Israel [13]

The fools made it too!  This report (I will omit the details) also has the disinformationist crude device: ”reportedly.”

“He was reportedly hung up by his thumbs and beaten every day for ten years.”

No — hung by the thumbs for ten years!  Anonymous sources appear so often in his work one feels one gets to know them.

Social Market Foundation

Like others in Editorial Intelligence Finkelstein was an acolyte of David Owen when he led the Social Democratic Party. But Finkelstein was one of the most right-wing members in the Hague office.  Finkelstein stood as an SDP candidate in the 1987 elections and  went on to become director of the Social Market Foundation.  This has its own connections to Fishburn Hedges who fund Editorial Intelligence. [14]

“As the lobbying organisation for market-oriented reforms of public services, the Social Market Foundation is often seen as the epitome of Right-wing thinking. Although it dislikes this description, it has been a training ground for two successive Tory research chiefs — Danny Finkelstein and Rik Nye.”[15]

SMF policy advisors are:
Wendy Alexander
Matthew d’Ancona (also with EI)
Lord Dahrendorf
Anthony Giddens
Lord Haskins
Trevor Philips
Lord Stevenson

Its patrons are:
Lord Flowers, Labour Peer Lord Lipsey (the former political editor of the Economist has long been influential with Labour revisionists), Rt Hon Lord Owen, Lord Sainsbury of Turville and Lord Skidelsky.  Beth Egan who previously worked at Demos has recently left.  Philip Collins who previously worked for Frank Field MP tried to focused the SMF’s work in a more Blairite direction, but its all David Cameron now.

Ann Rossiter the Director, prior to joining the SMF, worked for four years as a Director of Fishburn Hedges and for Lexington Communications.  Nina Temple, the Head of Development and Communications, was the last secretary of the British Communist Party. SMF’s site has

“Under her reforming leadership the CP voted to disband and set up Democratic Left, later to become the New Politics Network. In that role she worked to establish various projects including Unions 21, Make Votes Count (a client of PR firm Luther Pendragon) and the Respect festivals.”

But there’s a bit more to it than that.  The SMF’s Katherine Raymond was a Special Adviser to David Blunkett but departed as the Tories started the New Conservatives game.  Their address, 11 Tufton Street, and no doubt a lot more, is shared with the Adam Smith Institute and a whole lot more which should be the subject of another entry.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

Finkelstein is also a ‘labeler.’ He will set himself up to put down practically anyone rocking the gravy boat.  On Nobel prize winner Harold Pinter — well he might have impressed the experts but the Finkelstein sees through all this and declared in the Times: “The great dramatist has the right to intervene in politics, just as anyone else has. But he doesn’t have the right to be taken seriously. Pinter simply has nothing interesting to say.” [16] Not so much chutzpah as gall there, but imagine writing that without it occurring to you that…well he’ll never get it really and he makes enough money out of not knowing and here Finkelstein is part of the pack mentality:

“This is the standard, Soviet-style assertion that critics of power are afflicted by psychological disorder, with the concocted ‘sins’ of power randomly selected as a focus for neurotic ire. To consider the robotically consistent nature of the smears — and how we find ourselves assuming that there must be something to them — reveals much about how freedom of expression is crushed in our society.” [17]

There is no exposure of the crimes of power in his work. But when widely celebrated talents choose to express political dissent for Finkelstein they then become idiots speaking beyond their competence.  If we were to put Finkelstein and Pinter on the scales it is Daniel who would be found abominably wanting.  Who will people be reading in the future?

Notes

[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,21129-

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/jul/14/israel.middleeastthemedia

[3] Daniel Finkelstein The Times, 26 Jan 2005 this report seems to have vanished from the web.

[4] http://www.unitedjerusalem.org/index2.asp?id=59058

[5] http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/israeln/05oct01.html

[6] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,21129-1990872,00.html

[7] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,21129-1927480,00.html

[8] http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/crime/terrorists/ramzi-yousef/

[9] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html

[10] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html

[11] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article413930.ece

[12] & [13] http://www.kurd.org/newsletters/20011029094223.html

[14] http://politics.guardian.co.uk/thinktanks/story/0,10538,1539926,00.html

[15] http://www.cipfa.org.uk/pt/pt_details_c.cfm?news_id=4717

[16] ‘Warning: what you are about to read is f****** poetic,’ The Times, March 9, 2005.

[17] http://www.coldtype.net/ David Edwards — brilliant fools unthinkable thoughts.

To see Finkelstein’s work in its proper context: http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/416

Sourcewatch has a report on SMF’s lobby flogging at conferences.  A quid-pro-quo for sponsoring a talk is that a representative of the sponsor sits on the discussion panel.

“Britain, 2005. Saddam Hussein, still the ruler of Iraq and possessor of a long-range nuclear missile, seeks revenge on the west. Warned by intelligence reports of Saddam’s plan, the United States deploys a space-based missile shield, which will catch the Iraqi rocket before it gets to Washington. The key installation is based in Yorkshire — although the shield does not protect Britain. Saddam tells the head of his nuclear warfare programme to set the controls of the missile for London …”
(John Lloyd, New Statesman 28/8/00)

Few people will remember that, but amnesia is an essential requirement for taking John Lloyd’s work seriously. He does not write in the public interest: we appear only to be scolded like children…and this leaves the question in whose interests does he write? Even as far back as 1972, his arrival as Editor of Time Out was seen by some as an attempt to change the magazine’s radical priorities: “his experiences reporting from the province, had changed his politics.” As 70s radicalism accelerated Time Out caught the attention of the authorities — and vice versa — but Lloyd chose a different path. (1)

In a nutshell (and this now seems like some kind of template) he joined the Weekend World team (76-77) coming under the influence of Brian Walden et al, joined the Financial Times, wrote a book on the Miner’s strike (they were undemocratic), fell in love with Thatcherism, studied in the states, joined a think tank and St Anthony’s (96-99) and fronted for New Labour via the Foreign Policy Centre and much else (99-). He is unclear when he left the Communist Party, but by 97 he was sitting next to John Bolton at the American Enterprise Institute talking about New Labour.

Prior to his recent resignation, New Statesmen writers termed him the ‘house reactionary’, some sort of atavistic throwback to Paul Jonston, who also “fitted in with the left for a spell”. Lloyd even talks of a religious conversion, forgetting that faith and reason are separate things:

“When I ceased to be a communist and therefore ditched an essentially undemocratic philosophy, I adopted democracy as a new faith with the real fervour of the convert. We centre-left ex-communists believe passionately in democracy because we’ve reasoned ourselves towards it, so we are perhaps more prepared to support wars that establish or defend it.” (2)

Leaving aside the incongruous combination of ‘New Labour’ and ‘democracy,’ Somewhat to the contrary he explicitly linked his pro-war stance to Marx’s own support for the British Empire against backward nations:

“It’s that side of Marx that argues that imperialism was good for India… the side of Marx that disliked soft liberals and said that if you’re going to make the world better, you have to go through a number of necessary evils.” (3)

Where Marx was right was in his contention was that Hegal was wrong in his description of the state working automatically in the interests of the people — Hegal’s version of events was copied from the government’s own documents: and it is this trap that Lloyd cannot escape from. But where has the fervour of the convert really taken him? Together with BAP’s Nick Butler and Baroness Symons he is a director of the American East-West Institute. Funded by its impressive array of elite directors, Its hon. chair is George H.W. Bush and quite a few back channel people. As ever the institute has an umbrella organisation, wait for it — the American Iranian Council (line-up includes directors of Enron, Chevron Texaco, the President of Halliburton). They should sort out the problem.

Lloyd’s (Rio Tinto) prize winning essay ‘Right and Left to Right and Wrong’ reminisced about his days with the young Tony Blair expelling ‘the militants’ from the Hackney Labour party. It also made great play of the massive shifts with the withdrawal of clause four: but how serious was the commitment to this? Here is Geoff Mulgan in 1991, the man in charge of Labour’s re-nationalisation plans:

“There will be no need for cash. We will make use of the complex web of debts and stakes in other generating companies. There will be no increase in the PSBR… I can’t say how we will do it. The uncertainties that exist here would make it foolish of me to be more specific.” (4)

When Blair launched the Social Exclusion Unit in 1997, even its very conceptual existence was heralded by Lloyd as ‘an exposition of a revolution in the philosophy and practice of provision, in the conception of the welfare state, in the methods and ethos of addressing poverty’. (5)

By the time of his Prospect article of October 99, quotes from what appears to be a range of opinion are actually from the line up of Demos. Selling corporate-friendly myths at the Financial Times fitted in nicely with being a New Labour mouthpiece, so Lloyd joined Mulgan and Mark Leonard in Demos and the Foreign Policy Centre (FPC) and as if to order produced a couple of dubious essays: one supporting the new world order the other attacking all dissent towards it.

‘The Mezzanine’

Although invisible to the mainstream press, both think tank’s location and context, was within a suspicious gathering of newly created groups with interlocking directorships which ultimately worked as one company under the name of ‘The Mezzanine’. These were supplemented by fake grass roots organisations, lobby fronts, wealthy funding bodies (with political targets) and other think tanks — including Peter Mandelson’s The Policy Network — which were created by or modified specifically to aid the government and its private agencies, propaganda outlets and front organisations. (6) This was well underway when Lloyd decided to throw in his lot with the FPC, which:

“…accepted more than £100,000 from an unnamed Russian oligarch to establish a programme on Russian democracy. The money does not come directly; it is channelled through London PR companies presided over by a retinue of former new Labour special advisers. The PR people want to shift public sympathy away from Vladimir Putin, who is at odds with several oligarchs, and they are no doubt delighted that the project has led to a paper criticising Downing Street’s closeness to the Russian president.” (7)

Funded by mercenary companies and a kind of re-run of the IRD, the FPC’s patrons were Robin Cook and Tony Blair, which now sounds like a sick joke. In ‘We can save the new world order’ (8) in the aftermath of 9/11, he combines a ‘new (left) world order’ with Robin Cook’s (more mythical) ‘ethical foreign policy’, whose growth was stunted by a “malign alliance” (he can’t bring himself to say conspiracy) of the ‘foreign policy establishments and the “old left”’. The day after the huge war protest he would claim Blair was ethically leading Bush into the Iraq war: “the American leader is following the British one”. (9)

His ‘The Protest Ethic’ draws way too extensively from Samuel Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations to assert that “Islam has been from its inception a ‘religion of the sword’” and that Moslems are intrinsically more hostile than any other religious civilisation. And here you realise how badly misleading he is. He will happily argue that: “The anti-war movement… is guilty of the worst kind of moral equivalence, equating Bush and Blair with Saddam and Bin Laden. It has been seduced by anti-Americanism.” (10) When in the Protest Ethic p63 we had:

“The only political grouping now using the tactics developed by the global movements — sporadic use of violence and oppositionism through uncontrollable and unpredictable networks — is Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. In taking the destructive potential of such tactics and strategies to a far more lethal extreme…”

Note that that the demonisation is ‘the global movements’ not even protesters — Lloyd hates organisations like Medecins Sans Frontieres. In ‘How anti-Americanism betrays the left’ (11) he argued that the left’s critique “bends all facts to fit the ideological line”. All facts? So what honest ethical policy would he lead Labour into?

“It is a fairly radical policy and it comes close to some aspects of what has become known as Neo Conservative politics in the United States — the proposal of a new kind of interventionism which has been called liberal interventionism, or in some places neo-imperialism.” (12)

The Pipes are calling

His principle role has been to support those who have sold the UK into this Eva Braun-like marriage to the US administration’s messianic vision. His lofty notion that: “Journalists must question every world view — and that includes the liberal-rationalist one they so often espouse” doesn’t include the neo-cons. ‘Winning the War on Terror’, (13) was more of an advert rather than uncritical, and has been reused by the American Enterprise Institute and other far-right sites. His “Islam’s battle with a hostile world” went straight on to Richard Pipes’ site and was something of a love letter:

“US confidence that it can win the war on terror, effect a regime change in Iraq and bring democracy to the Islamic world stems, in part, from having done something like that before. If communism could be toppled in the Soviet bloc then, many Americans think, the Middle East can be just as radically reshaped. [...] Now the ideas and assumptions behind anti-communism are being revived to fight another ideology. Just as many believe communism was the biggest threat to western democracy in the last half of the 20th century, so many see radical Islam as the gravest threat today. The concept of an existential struggle between good and evil has been revived, in many cases by people who were near the front line of the anti-communist battle of the cold war.” (14)

The article presents not the front line but the ‘Armchair Spartans’ Radek Sikorski, the New Atlantic Initiative, Encounter and the CIA, William Kristol, the Weekly Standard, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Richard and Daniel Pipes, and their Middle East Forum, Richard Perle, even Team B in a manner (who just made up their ‘facts’) which ignores all the investigative reporting of the past 50 years. It is Lloyd’s complete lack of ability to offer any analysis of these creatures that makes his work so uniquely useless. Take the Plame affair — for Lloyd:

“…the two main reporters on the case for The New York Times, Michael Gordon and Judith Miller [...] had a reputation, not easily won, for hard work and accuracy. If these two got it so wrong, how do you get it right? Or, [...] were they reporting information and beliefs held in good faith… which appeared to be right because the counter arguments appeared weaker or mendacious? And how does journalism avoid that?” (15)

He is in a world of his own here — seeing demons and angels. (16) Real analysis has shown up the neo-con’s desperate need for disinformation, and, clinging to their paradigm, Lloyd can only disinform his readers. What has happening in Iraq reveals journalists like him, and those he uncritically defends, as part of the web of deceit and too close to war mongers, profiteers and their special plans. William Burroughs once described Naked Lunch as a “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”. War gourmets don’t care where their free lunch comes from or who killed what.

Notes

1. Underground, Nigel Fountain, Routledge 1988.
2. The Independent Review, 25 February 2003.
3. ibid.
4. Hansard Debates, 5 December 1991.
5. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj85/lavalette.htm
6. “Tom Bentley, the Director of Demos is also a Director of York co148G, trading as The Mezzanine. The company was set up by the tenants of the Mezzanine floor of Elizabeth House through which Demos used to have a sublease for office space.”
7. New Statesman (NS), 31 January 2005.
8. NS, 1 October 2001.
9. Scotland on Sunday 16/2/03.
10. NS, 17 February 2003.
11. Observer, 17 March 2002.
12. http://www.fpc.org.uk/fsblob/235.pdf
13. Financial Times, 10 January 2003.
14. http://www.aei.org/research/nai/publications/pubID.16707,projectID.11/pub_detail.asp
15. Financial Times, 17 September 2005.
16. Michael Massing has argued that “the September 8, 2002, article by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction seems one of the most serious cases of misreporting in the entire run-up to the war. The piece provided a major boost to the administration’s case for war — and proved to be wrong in almost every detail. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17027
Miller is connected to Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, Guardian 19 August 2002.

This is the only chance you have to gain advantage. Therefore, set up throughout your kingdom ears and eyes that can pick up the weakest signals before they are apparent to your enemies.
—Machiavelli

Sandra Macleod is part of Editorial Intelligence and Chief Executive of Echo Research Limited and Inc. She used the Machiavelli quote above in a presentation she gave at the conference of the International Public Relations Association Gulf Chapter in Kuwait. In the context of her discussion of ‘stakeholder research’ Machiavelli is described as an ‘expert’.

She has been in ‘communications and reputation analysis and evaluation’ for 20 years so it must be time for analysis and evaluation of her own reputation. Her European PR consultancy, Hayes Macleod, won the Best New Agency of the Year Award in 1989. One never-ending activity of the PR industry are ‘awards’ ceremonies: a psychological compensation for the demerits of the game. Hayes Macleod (there is no record of it on the web) was most likely a temporary — some might conjecture ‘fly-by-night ‘— venture with her fellow Echo Research Non Executive Director, Roger Hayes, the Executive Director of the International Institute of Communications (founded in 1968 with the support of the Ford Foundation) whose career includes “senior positions with the British Nuclear Industry Forum, Ford of Europe, Thorn EMI, PA Management Consultants and Burson-Marsteller…” None of these positions reaffirm a warm trust in Hayes Macleod’s honesty or ability to objectively disseminate news as a free agent—on a basic level quite the contrary can be argued.

The British Nuclear Industry Forum (like many of the reactors) has changed its name (like many lobby groups) and is now the Nuclear Industry Association: the UK nuclear industry trade association which “undertakes representative, informational and lobbying activities on behalf of its members.” Their nice new web page http://www.niauk.org/ sets the tone thus: “Nuclear — Climate Friendly Energy,” below a badly repeated pattern of nice fluffy clouds, which in this context resemble another routine lethal gas escape.

The site offers ‘news,’ engaging in a pretense that it is unbiased. We are to ignore that Philip Dewhurst, the Chairman has been British Nuclear Fuels Ltd’s Group Corporate Affairs Director since April 2001 and is a “communications specialist by profession”, President of the Institute of Public Relations in 1999, founder member of the City of London Guild of Public Relations Practitioners and in 1998 was voted PR Professional of the year by ‘the readers’ of PR Week. Before joining BNFL, Dewhurst was UK Chief Executive of the leading consulting group Shandwick International.

It is much the same case with the other directors. Keith Parker, the Chief Executive of the NIA is ‘Head of Corporate Communications, accountable for the strategic direction of the Forum’s communications, public affairs, media relations and issue management programmes’. ‘Head of propaganda, secret connivance, spin and illusion’ doesn’t have the same ring. His little biography tells us that during the 1980s Parker worked in the Department of Energy on the 2 major ‘public inquiries’ into Sizewell B and Hinkley Point C. In the early 1990’s he was closely involved in policy formulation and decision making in the areas of nuclear power, coal, electricity generation and energy efficiency. Now he is a lobbyist and spin doctor for the industry — which does give us something of an insight into how things are done in the Nuclear Industries and their junkie-like dependence on PR.

PR Weak

But what of Macleod’s reputation? If we were to believe PR Week (which she kindly writes for) and Echo’s own press releases (ditto) she “has been named as one of the 100 most influential figures in the PR industry in the UK”, although ”has been named” is somewhat specious there. Being the 20th (which is the case) is not so much to boast about. But here we have the essence of PR — the artful distortion of fact. Leaving aside what she actually does for her customers, Echo’s web site gives us a glimpse of the process. Its section called ‘What the Critics Say’ includes no criticism. Only three articles are cited, one states Echo was “providing communications research and reputation analysis for [..] Government Departments such as The Home Office.” That’s the ‘not fit for purpose’ Home Office whose reputation now stands at possibly the lowest since its creation. Does the fact that Macleod has made money trying to distract from this make matters better or worse?

Here is Echo’s own carefully phrased statement on one other big client, the Ministry of Defence:

“The Ministry of Defence has the role of defending the United Kingdom and its interests, and strengthening international peace and stability. Like many government departments, it is continuously under scrutiny by the public and in the news media and responds to many calls for information and explanation. Echo Research analyzed the profile of the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces across all their operations, including Operation Telic (Iraq), assessing in particular the media debate around the case for Allied action in Iraq.”

But it is not all doom and gloom. Echo also work for The Environment Agency, let’s see the blurb this time:

“The Environment Agency protects and improves the environment, for both current and future generations. Its role includes legal action against infringements of environmental regulations. In this context, Echo Research tracked media coverage to see how the Agency’s actions to “name and shame” organizations violating environmental regulations had penetrated the public consciousness. The Agency also has a public information responsibility to help people deal with environmental hazards. Echo Research evaluated the extent to which people had access to safety information in times of flooding — a hazard likely to increase in tandem with the effects of global warming.”

Now you might be thinking ‘hey didn’t Mcleod’s fellow Echo Director Roger Hayes have an intimate proximity to the Nuclear Industy’s main lobby group?’ The inference being that Echo might not necassarily suit this environment as it were. But what is ‘The Environment Agency’, really i.e. as opposed to the PR puff reproduced above? It has £805m budget and is a government funded quango stuffed full of government appointees (who seem experts at sitting on committees) and Echo’s relationship is all quite normal.

The Environment Agency’s, Professor Lynda Warren is also on something called the ‘Committee on Radioactive Waste Management Committee,’ which is itself full of appointees including David Bonser, Director of British Nuclear Fuels plc and other representitives of the Industry. Another board member is Dr Lyndon Stanton from ICI and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority which has quite a line-up itself.

The Agency runs Charging schemes such as water abstraction licences hence it has Peter Matthews, the Deputy Managing Director of Anglian Water International.

The Agency’s Sara Parkin OBE and Barbara Young (Baroness Young of Old Scone) are members of The Forum for the Future — an elaborate form of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility,’ much as the Agency is itself. According to Friends of the Earth the Agency’s reports are misleading:

“…research has shown that a number of firms are legally allowed to release hundreds of tonnes of cancer-causing gases every year, but these companies are not highlighted as poor performers in the Agency report. Ironically, the biggest polluter — Ineos Chlor in Runcorn, releasing over 2000 tonnes of cancer-causing chemicals in 2002 (latest published data) — is highlighted in the Agency report as a good performer.”

It is also worth noting that data for Scotland and Northern Ireland is not available, since the Agency runs no ‘Pollution Inventory’ for these countries. When asked her opinion of the efficacy of Agency’s reprimands to big business, Lady Young of Old Scone, the chief executive replied:

“No deterrent whatsoever…”

The International Public Relations Association proudly presents… in a good light

The Public presumably assume that PR is aimed at them, but oddly PR seems to be in need of PR itself and is engaged in a dizzy self-referential spiral:

“For a further consecutive year, Echo presented an analysis of how the British press portrays PR at PR Week’s PR The Media conference. Has the image of PR changed since tracking began in 1999? What conclusions can be drawn from the interdependence between the media and PR? Is PR’s image spinning out of control? Or is greater advocacy by the PR industry on its value and role good for PR?”

Macleod has contributed to two ‘Gold Papers’ for the International Public Relations Association: “Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Public Relations” and “Public Relations Evaluation: Professional Accountability”. She was also a member of their Summit Advisory Board along with Hayes and Dewhurst mentioned above. The 2005 ‘summit’ proudly boasted of the inclusion of Alistair Campbell no doubt heading the IPRA Campaign for Media Transparency. The IPRA gave awards to various campaigns such as:

* Fleishman Hillard’s on behalf of the document shredding machine maker Fellowes,

* Edelman, who have finally crawled out of the woodwork on their work for the Moroccan American Center for Policy (a somewhat anonymous agent for the Government of Morocco) which put up a phoney humanitarian look-alike site, as some sort of vestigial remnant of the Cold War — the object of the game here is to overturn the International Court of Justices’ ruling in 1975 that Morocco has no claim to the territory of Western Sahara. Sahara-Watch (http://sahara-watch.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_sahara-watch_archive.html) had already spotted that the website was registered by Edelman’s David White. The mentality here is that while:

“Reports from Amnesty International and other groups show that the Moroccan Government is still denying its people basic political rights including the imprisonment of peaceful human rights activists and the use of torture. One of the most notable human rights violations by the Moroccan Government has been its attempts to silence debate on the issue of how to resolve the Western Sahara dispute.”

IPRA slap Edelman on the back for behaving like the CIA.

* APEX communications (Nairobi, Kenya) for a public information campaign ‘to combat public scepticism toward the privatised Nairobi Water Company. They built confidence in the new company and raised revenue collection by 54 percent’.

The IPRA Board also includes Donald Boham of Shell Nigeria — how well is he doing according to these criteria:

“The way oil wealth is managed in Nigeria is one of the key issues facing those living there. The government and oil companies have profited by hundreds of billions of dollars since oil was first discovered. Yet most Nigerians living in the oil producing regions are living in dire poverty. The oil region in Nigeria seems to be stuck in a time warp, with little real change since oil was discovered 45 years ago. Away from the main towns there is no real development, no roads, no electricity, no running water and no telephones. Most people are struggling to survive on less than $1 a day. People who live in the Niger Delta blame the oil companies for this shocking state of neglect, particularly Shell Petroleum Development Company, which produces most of the country’s oil.”

That report — which goes on to detail the poverty — is the first thing which comes up on Google with the serch terms “Donald Boham of Shell Nigeria”. Boham blames the government. The second Google result (from Forbes) blurs that distinction somewhat:

“Cozy ties between oil multinationals and the government (a partner in all ventures via the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., or NNPC) make evidence of mischief hard to find.”

The report outlines the all-too-familiar mendacity inherent in Shell’s activities in Nigeria, in this case Abacha’s petroleum minister, Dauzia Loya Etete claim to have taped conversations between agents of the vice president and Shell discussing dirty deals and concludes with:

“Shell hopes to settle the dispute via arbitration in London. “It’s all speculation,” says Boham, of Etete’s charges. “The process of law will tease out the actual situation.” Maybe. Fire struck the NNPC offices in December, destroying many documents. Police are looking into arson. Given the history of past investigations into corruption, this trail will probably go nowhere.”

And the third hit — containing accusations that foreign oil companies are “providing their helicopters and air strips for military operations in the oil region” — is from FOX News. Neither the BBC, Forbes or Fox News are what one would term Anarchists. As we wander down the page its a litany of “a major, week-long oil spill”.

The Institute for Covert Connections

Macleod is a Trustee of the Institute for Public Relations (USA), a Fellow of the Institute of Public Relations (UK), Member of the Market Research Society, a Companion of the Chartered Institute for Management, Editorial Advisor to the Corporate Communications Journal, and Member of the Advisory Committee to Stirling University (Department of Film and Media Studies).

Echo Research engages in reputational analysis and measurement, with offices in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, Echo works for a quarter of the FTSE and Fortune 100 companies (together with Government Departments such as The Home Office, the DTI and Surrey Police, and non-governmental organisations such as UNICEF and WWF) on: Consumer, Financial Services, Health, IT, Professional Service, Telecoms & Media, Utilities, Public Sector and NGOs. Echo Research is on the Register of Expert Witnesses — which might surprise some given the somewhat notorious disrespect for evidence at times associated with PR.

She has also served as Board Member of the DTI’s Business Links and is a Freeman of the City of London Guild of Public Relations.

Conferences

She will be part of the Expert Speaker Faculty at the Public Relations Conference in Dubai in September 2006. This kicks off with the Chairperson’s Welcome And Opening Address by Nima Abu-Wardeh, Presenter, BBC World — ‘Nation Shall Speak PR unto Nation’ perhaps… The event culminates in a Gala Dinner Announcing The “PR Professional of the Year” Award. Who will be the middle-man’s middle-man, will the prize be outsourced? Is it all just a cheap publicity stunt and are their prizes for that?

Sandra Macleod will be the moderator of the ‘How To Influence The Media Agenda.’ But this is no tedious homage to Dale Carneigie, right after the session its straight into:

“Effective Media Relations – Your Chance To Face The Media Head On! This is an open Q & A session as you take to the ‘hot seat’ and voice your concerns on the hot media relation issues of 2006, the good , the bad and the ugly, to a distinguished media panel.
Moderator: Fiona Ross, OBE, TV Presenter and Former Political Editor, Scottish TV, UK.

Panelists: Nima Abu-Wardeh, Presenter, BBC World – Middle East Business Report and Founder, MZone, UAE, Brian Scudder, Managing Director, Switch Media, UAE
MZone are sponsors of the event.

Fantastic — but influence to what end, influence for what client and what do they mean by ‘influence’: change, distort, pervert? If they are to be expert witnesses then why not a panel of judges and the title ‘How To Influence The Legal Agenda’ or politicians ‘How To Influence The Political Agenda’… Well we are already nearly there with a look at Echo’s ‘Global Directors’:

*Clay Brendish CBE, Non Executive Chairman: The former Deputy Chairman of CMG plc and founder and Executive Chairman of the International IT consultancy firm Admiral plc, Brendish is Non-Executive Director of British Telecommunications plc and Herald Investment Trust plc, Non Executive Chairman of Anite Group plc and Close Beacon Investment Fund. He is also External Chairman of the Meteorological Office Board, a trustee of Economist Newspapers Limited and Chair of City University’s IS Group.

*Roger Hayes, Non Executive Director: Hayes is Executive Director of the International Institute of Communications representing over 1,000 companies in seventy countries in the broadcasting, telecommunications, and new media industry. With a career that includes senior positions with the British Nuclear Industry Forum, Ford of Europe, Thorn EMI, PA Management Consultants and Burson-Marsteller, Hayes is recognised world-wide for his “leading-edge thinking on the changing role of the private sector.”

*Simon Summers, Non Executive Director: Senior Bursar St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. Previously Co-Head of the Global Technologies Group in Barclays Capital’s Investment Banking Division and Corporate Director for Barclays in North London.

*Michael Morley, Non Executive Chairman: International Chairman of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide. Morley started up the agency’s first overseas office in London in 1967. He went on to be named President International, and opened offices in Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America, supported by an affiliate network in key centers around the world. Morley has managed multi-national PR programs for companies that include United Parcel Service, AMADEUS Global Travel Distribution, NCR, VISA International, British Airways, Ernst & Young, Hoffman-La Roche, Schering Plough, Warner Lambert, S.C. Johnson and Hertz Corporation. Chairman of the jury of the IPR Golden World Awards, Morley is the author of the book “How to Manage your Global Reputation.”

*Susan Restler, Non Executive Director: Co-Founder with Diana Woolis and President of Knowledge in the Public Interest, has had a 25 year career in financial services with JP Morgan. She was a Managing Director and head of Marketing for JP Morgan Private Banking and JP Morgan Investment Management. Prior to joining Woolis in forming KPI, she developed the marketing strategy for an Internet-based personal financial management service. Susan has served on the Board of the Brooklyn Kindergarten Society, a network of five publicly funded day care centers and is now a trustee of the Connelly Center, a middle school for at risk girls. She also chaired the Board of Trustees of the Packer Collegiate Institute, an independent school in Brooklyn, New York.

*Sylvie Testard-Ramirez, Managing Director, Echo Research, France: Specialist in International External and Internal Communication, a member of the International Committee of the French Association for Internal Communication (Afci).

In the Evening Standard, 21 August, 2001 Lang made the following observations about the media:

“As to whether news is ‘Manufactured’ or made up for the titillation of the consumer: let’s look at some of the stories dominating our headlines this August. The Hamiltons; British troops in Macedonia; the missing 15-year-old Danielle Jones; four hospital deaths caused by blocked oxygen tubes; a possible cure for CJD. Of all these stories, only the Hamiltons could possibly be ‘Manufactured’ — with the help of a PR agent. It’s true that PR agents and government spin doctors are becoming more and more sophisticated at manipulating the media, but, equally, journalists and the public are becoming more cynical about what is put in front of them.[2]

Ignoring that tales of horror, death, war and so on have merged with forms of entertainment for the ‘cynical’ and jaded palette of the people who create news programmes, and that the MOD news-manage to an extraordinary extent, she makes a good point. But how are PR agents and government spin doctors becoming more and more sophisticated at manipulating the media —who is teaching them the tricks of the trade?

Just before we go on — should you want to book Kirsty to say things like this in a newscastery tone, Lang is handled by Knight Ayton Management who have been representing news and current affairs presenters for the past 20 years. They also have Fiona Armstrong, Zeinab Badawi, Rosie Boycott, Fiona Bruce, Michael Buerk, John Kampfner, Martin Lewis, Donald MacCormick, Trevor McDonald, Tim Sebastian, Peter Sissons, Jon Snow, Moira Stuart and many other z-list ‘celebrites’

If you don’t want to hire a celeb they also do media training via their associate company Group K Broadcasting Ltd. Here the pitch is to companies which they automatically assume are in a bit of trouble:

“Chances are that neither you nor your colleagues would be really comfortable with a tough television or radio interview… All it takes is a day of your time, discovering the “tricks of the trade” and how you can master them.”

Their Managing Director and Media Training Course Director is Allan King a main Presenter, or Anchor as the Americans say, with Sky News for the last ten years. Tim Sebastian also runs a similar course with Knight Ayton, here:

“Tim carries out a number of private engagements enabling organisations the opportunity [sic] to personally experience his journalistic hard talking skills. He is specialised in interviewing high-level company personnel in front of clients or for internal boards of management, posing the kinds of penetrating questions that only an experienced outsider can do.”

The first Group K Broadcasting testimonial from a happy customer is by way of a “personal thank you” from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), from the Strategy and Training Section of their Public Diplomacy Department, which gushes forth:

:”Brilliant, Really useful helps & tips for presenting oneself (and UK policy) professionally. Excellent session one of the best I’ve attended at the FCO… A real professional keen to share his knowledge.” [3]

A second testimonial from the same source states: “By far the highlight of the last two years was the two days training which you gave to Sir David Hannay, our Ambassador to the UN, the results of which are clear for all to see.”

Yes —a war in Iraq. More on Public Diplomacy later, as they say on TV.

Careering

Lang began her journalism career as a BBC news trainee in 1986 on programmes such as ”Today” and the ”World at One”. From 1989 to 1991 she was the Central European reporter for the BBC World Service based in Budapest, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Balkans conflict. She went on to be the BBC’s Paris correspondent for both television and radio and The Sunday Times. After a period reporting for BBC 2′s Newsnight she joined Channel 4 in 1998 and then Radio 4’s dull arts programme Front Row in 2004.

Sorry… I know commercials are annoying but actually, if you are serious about trying to book her for a Corporate or awards ceremony you would be better going through JLA’s website, she’s also on their books. JLA do you a whole package and are providers of “business and keynote speakers, motivational speakers, after dinner speakers, conference presenters and facilitators, awards hosts and entertainers for corporate and industry events.”[4]

Its a boom time for this sort of thing: “JLA will source experts to meet all business needs eg. Leadership, Entrepreneurialism, Executing change, Tapping new markets and Culture change.”

Their motivational speakers go from the dizzy heights of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong down to the woeful lows of Alastair Campbell and Heather Mills-McCartney. Their website is fantastic, I’ve put in some links below, with the price of the celebrities tagged alongside them like items in a shop —but it is not cheap: Buzz and Neil are £25k (although Heather will do it for £10k to £25k, well probably not now that she has made millions off of Sir Paul but you never know).

Where where we — of course: journalists, politicians and show business are separate. Gravitas-laden Statesmen can’t be bought with mere filthy lucre: but this isn’t their day job, in this context they are ‘after dinner speakers.’ Here JLA’s list includes: Rt Hon David Blunkett MP (£5 to £10k), Gyles Brandreth (£2.5k to £5k), Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP (£5k to £10k), Rt Hon William Hague MP (£10k to £25k), Christine Hamilton (£2.5k to £5k), Boris Johnson MP (£5k to £10k), Rt Hon David Mellor QC (was £2.5k to £5k but has dropped off their books), Michael Portillo (£5k to £10k), Rt Hon Lord Chris Smith (£2.5k to £5k), Tim Yeo MP (£2.5k to £5k). On and on the list goes — this group are presented together with a bunch of criminals, dope fiends, jokers, sex pests and the like (and Alastair Campbell who was £10k to £25k but has gone up to over £25k). John Humphrys‘ little photograph has the curious caveat ‘Q&A only’ — nothing kinky you understand —and is in two different price brackets.

Kirsty Lang was a snip at £1k to £2.5k but went up to £2.5k to £5k—the client can probably haggle.

The international affairs section has Jacques Attali, Mikhail Gorbachev (in the same price bracket as Lulu), Sir Christopher Meyer KCMG (£5k to £10k — Johnny Vegas costs more and is arguably more diplomatic), Joschka Fischer, John Major was on it (and will probably be back now that the Carlyle Group are faultering) and for the same money you could have got Rory Bremner) and Lord George Robertson “the most powerful Scotsman in the World”.

Lang is in good company: John Simpson (was £5k to £10k but now retails at £10k to £25k), Andrew Neil (£5k to £10k) and Andrew Marr (who asks £10k to £25k) and many more. It is awesome the money to be made here, take Boris Johnson for instance: one month alone and he makes about £100,000 according to They Work For You. And JLA is just one of the booking agencies he uses.

Or look at George Galloway, according to Jeremy Lee, managing director of JLA: “Galloway’s main asset is his achievement in breaking through the “recognition barrier” in America. He believes he could fulfil 20 paid-for engagements in a fortnight.”  That’s estimated at between £14,000 to £16,000 per engagement — the sky’s the limit.

Sieg Heiling the Dictatorship of the Market

Of course Kirsty is above all this show biz whoredom — she gives talk at more refined venues untainted by the whiff of filthy lucre such as of the 2004 RSA Morgan Stanley Lecture on ‘Britishness’ along with Tom Bentley (who used to be the director of Demos), Sukhvinder Stubbs (Trustee of Demos), [[Nick Pettigrew]] (Associate Director at MORI), Professor Kenneth Minogue (Chairman of the Bruges Group, director of the Centre for Policy Studies and a trustee of Civitas who shared an office with Demos) and Paul Crake (ex-Communication Director of the Design Council who fund Demos and are part of the UK’s Public Diplomacy efforts). Here think tanks dominate the market.

Crake is the director of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) which has promoted the more refined work of Germaine Greer (yes she’s with JLA £2.5k to £5k) , Sir Bernard Crick, Will Hutton, and Demos’ Geoff Mulgan (yes another JLA client £2.5k to £5k but since he’s into post modernism pay him in Monopoly Money and tell him Baudrilliard said it was just as good as hard cash) and many others.

Kirsty Lang is also the ever so serious presenter of ”The World”, an international current affairs programme broadcast globally on BBC World (with adverts and perhaps soon with adverts for her) and on BBC4 in the UK. Aficionados of the programme celebrate her gaffes — inherent in rolling news shows — claiming that she “completely forgot what programme she was on and clearly struggled to remember what to say at the top of the programme.”

She is often confused with Kirsty Wark. It is arguable that these types of programmes have not recovered from the satire of ”The Day Today”, (Armando Iannucci is £5k to £10k at JLA) and BBC World has been the subject of a few hoaxes in its time, but this is real from Lang:

“Hello George, I’m talking to you from Ground Zero. In fact, just behind me, is where the Twin Towers used to stand, now just a vast empty space and two very large holes.”[5]

Lang is on more comfortable gigs such as Jewish Book Week, sandwiched in between another Public Diplomacy guru, Mark Leonard on Europe and Editorial Intelligence’s John Kampfner on Marx (presumably Karl). We will return to Leonard below, and Kampfner is the object of a separate profile.

Public Diplomacy

Posing hard questions to those who represent the government is just one part of Lang’s job and no doubt an observation of all those training seminars is that if all they do is waffle back —

then that is the time to pounce with the killer follow-up. Here is Kirsty in action ripping into Stuart W. Holliday, Co-ordinator, International Information Programs (IIP), Department of State Foreign Press Center Briefing, Washington DC:

“Kirsty Lang from the BBC. In recent weeks we’ve seen increasing evidence of anti-American feeling growing in the world, and I was wondering how you felt the best way was to combat this. And with what messages do you hope to combat that? MR. HOLLIDAY: It is true that we’ve seen evidence of increasing anti-Americanism. I think that there are two broad reasons for this. One is that of course since the end of the Cold War we have obviously developed more independent views of essentially the world order that existed between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, that had many associated exchange and interactions between — whether it’s NATO, various non-NATO allies, development programs around the world. I think that we have seen that we — as the media space begins to fill — and it has over the last decade; there has been explosion throughout the world —that the United States, in the humble way that the president has talked about, must be there and must engage, whether it’s education and cultural programs, like the Fulbright and the International Visitor program, or informational programs, like these publications or speakers that we send around the world.”

Her reception of that question — she said nothing —is not exactly Christ denouncing the Pharisees and Sadduces.

The BBC World Service are major recipients of Treasury funding for Public Diplomacy. They argue that the World Service would attend committee meetings as an observer in recognition of its editorial independence. “However, the World Service acknowledges the requirement of the FCO that in the interests of proper accountability for the use of public money, its objectives are pursued and monitored in as robust and effective way as possible.” [6]

Most government bodies get their way by citing funding as having a precondition and concomitant obligation towards ‘public accountability’: thereby you must fulfil the remit that the funding was based on —i.e. push the government line. The Public Diplomacy Board led to a merging of the FCO, think tanks like the Foreign Policy Centre, the BBC and PR companies. Committees and Boards like this are headed by the people in charge of the public purse. A lot of the people on the committee are there to be in receipt of those funds. The FCO trust them because of this cartel of interest, nods and winks and horse trading: its a free country as to what you release to the outside world once you’re in the tent.

Lord Carter of Coles defines Public Diplomacy as: “Work aiming to inform and engage individuals and organisations overseas, in order to improve understanding of and influence for the United Kingdom in a manner consistent with governmental medium and long term goals.”[7]

Britain spends less ($330 million) on international broadcasting than the United States ($540 million), but the BBC World Service has a larger audience than all of the US international radio services combined. [8]

Increasingly we see the content of Public Diplomacy portrayed as news, or news-like information that accentuates propaganda and counter propaganda. Colleen Graffy who memorably stated that three suicides at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay was a “good PR move to draw attention”, works as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. [9]

And we see the Foreign Policy Centre and Centre for European Reform’s Mark Leonard inveighing in here with the FPC’s BRITAIN MUST FUND “STRATEGY FOR HEARTS AND MINDS” IN MIDDLE EAST. [10] The terminology ‘Hearts & Minds’ is carelessly drawn from the American Army’s insane PR in Veitnam. His targets are people too, just like the military, and he argues that the British Council should have direct contact with one in twenty people in the Arab and Muslim world, and for the BBC World Service to reach millions through its Arab language TV news channel. To avoid the inevitable accusations of “imperialism”, all assistance ‘should be based on the UN’s human development agenda’. Avoidance is evasion here: evasion of the contribution to the brutality of the UK’s foreign policy in the middle-east. [11]

This work cites the Connecting Futures Survey part of which involved Lord Stevenson of the British Council which argued its independence from the FCO and MI6.

Before he became Lord Kerr and moved onto Shell and Rio Tinto, Sir John Kerr (permenant Under-secretary of State FCO and head of the Diplomatic Service 1997-2002) and member of the British Council, was asked of this independence in a Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, and let something slip despite being given as easy ride:

“The MI6, I understand, is deemed to be part of the Foreign Office. I realise the relationship is blurred. I wondered as this is a report to Parliament whether or not there could or should be reference to this.

(Sir John Kerr) I do not recognise a blur, Mr Mackinlay, I recognise only a clear division between the money that we are accounting for here, [...], and the Single Intelligence Vote which is a completely different sum of money accounted for in a completely different way. So what I am giving evidence on is the use of the Diplomatic Vote by the Foreign Office, the Council, the World Service and we should not forget BTI. I am not responsible for the Intelligence Vote.

You are not responsible but do you have a stewardship of it in any way?

(Sir John Kerr) No, I do not.

I see. So can you just clarify the inter-relationship? To what extent is MI6 Foreign Office?

(Sir John Kerr) In terms of the Diplomatic Vote there is a complete cut off between the Diplomatic Service and the Home Civil Service on the one hand, and the Secret Intelligence Service on the other. I am not their Accounting Officer, I am not responsible for them.

Okay, wrong forum, eh?

(Sir John Kerr) The division has got even clearer than it used to be because we have agreed with those in the Secret Intelligence Service a full cost charging system for cases where they use our services and vice versa.” [emphasis added] [12]

The typically establishment pretence of separation seemed to have slipped at the end there. So there is no connection except when SIS use British Council services and ‘vice versa’.

Polls show that Britain’s reputation in the Middle East has declined because of its foreign policy. In the British Council’s Connecting Futures Survey, when respondents — a lot of whom were poor children who were bribed with toys which is a disgrace to any supposedly scientific survey—were asked to name the negative aspects of the UK, 37% named its political stance. The closeness of the UK to the US was the most frequently cited factor in its falling standing.

The Foreign Policy Centre, British Trade International, British Council, The BBC World Service, FCO and the Secret Intelligence Service collide under the pressures of presenting a facade for the grim meat hook reality of the UK’s foreign policy. [13] Zeinab Badawi , Mark Leonard , Sir Michael Jay (Permanent Under-Secretary FCO) and David Green (British Council Director General) are members of the Public Diplomacy Strategy Board (an FCO committee).

But back to Kirsty Lang: what for instance was the Public Diplomacy of this question just after the bombings of the twin towers?

“Kirsty Lang: Our next question is from Kofi in Ghana: Do you find it tragic that some very intelligent people, especially those in the Muslim world, still want to rationalize the attacks on New York City in the name of fighting for Palestine?”[14]

The format of that question relies on a misplaced trust of Lang and the BBC — it is as if the question had been randomly plucked out of some garden fete tombola by Joyce Grenfell circa 1958. Not with Zenab Badawi and all those FCO guys on the Public Diplomacy Board. [15] The format of this question is comparable in formal structure to —”Do you think all black people should be shot or hung?”

Badawi is also an adviser to the Foreign Policy Centre and the new presenter of The World on BBC Four, the UK’s first daily news bulletin devoted principally to international news, she is also handled by Knight Ayton Management, who as we have seen work for the Public Diplomacy Board in answering those hard questions posed by Badawi and Lang. ‘Small World’ might be a better title for the programme. [16]

Model Management

Back to the serious stuff: Lang gets quoted in the ”Washington Post” —this is a serious journalist not some establishment glove puppet:

“It’s much easier to take the language that’s given to you, and the government knows that full well. So if you keep saying ‘coalition forces,’ ‘coalition forces,’ people will use it. I think people do need to be more careful. They do take phrases willy-nilly from the government without thinking, without seriously analysing what they say.” [17]

Hold on, if you’re serious about booking her, Lang is also with CMM (Celebrity Model Management) they say they are ‘The UK Public Relations & Advertising Industry’s Preferred Celebrity Booking Agency & Keynote Speaker Bureau’ so best go with them, JLA look a bit pricey and these people are a tad more downmarket. [18]

Say you’re an Union Carbide executive and your Napalm factory’s just (accidentally) wiped out the local population —the CMM will help you out with:

*Raising brand or campaign awareness.

*Raising a brands profile and media coverage.

*Attracting new audiences.

*Demystifying key messages and issues.

*Mobilising public opinion and involvement.

*Contributing to brand repositioning in the public perception.

*Reinvigorating a long running campaign.

They also do a nice line in “glamorous girls,” who “may be available from CMM for your celebrity driven activity or photo-call.” They can provide Joanne Guest, posh Liz Hurley, Jordan —of course, Keira Knightley, Jodie Marsh, Dannii Minogue, Carole Smilie, Abi Titmuss or Tara Palmer Tomkinson or loads more. Although there does not seem to be, how can we put it ‘call girls’ as such, but they do a fine line in ‘Political Speakers’ , some of whom may offer advice on the perils of that sort of thing.

The real beauty of all this is that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. In these troubled times busy executives need advice and relief on all manner of things from the horse’s mouth (but some sort of pattern is discernable possibly related to CMM’s other line of business). As a big company boss you might end up in jail, so CMM can get you: Jonathan Aitken ; you might have shagged your job away, well CMM can get you: Rt Hon David Blunket (his biog is missing); you might have ended up annoying an entire country, big deal, CMM can get you: Derek Hatton ; you might have shagged your job away again, no worries, CMM can get you: David Mellor ; you might have ended up too drunk to shag your job away but lost it anyway: well my man CMM can get you: Charles Kennedy ; you might have nearly shagged your job away but got away with it, well CMM can get you John Prescott; you might have nearly shagged John Major’s job away and would like to hire Edwina Curry CMM are on it; you might have become a bye-word for this process of ‘job-loss-shag’: yes Sir CMM can deploy Paddy Ashdown into your trouble spot; or you might have ended up pissing away millions if not billions of other people’s money with no actual excuse, fear not rogue trader, CMM can get you: Lord Norman Lamont.

Stars of stage screen and TV have to be careful — they might end up inadvertantly doing an ad for something and not get paid. Opportunities must be converted into profitable opportunities and that means someone pays for your time and that means you work for someone. Do you think racing drivers dress in overalls like that to look like rich punk rockers? Until the Morecambe and Wise show the actors who presented news programmes were accorded a totally unwarranted kudos —the days of waiving a fee or Reithian values are struggling. Yet somehow the BBC asked Kirsty Lang to step down from Editorial Intelligence because she was making outside money. Who isn’t?

Editorial Intelligence’s John Kampfner was the editor of the New Statesman (NS) which was a former Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications client.

The NS has described Editorial Intelligence as a small, self-referential, inbred clique comprised of press, TV, public relations, publishing and politics clones acting out a fantasy — some kind of depraved, pseudo-aristocracy hanging around Luke Johnson’s restaurants pawing and drooling over each other.

‘Media and PR workers have similar backgrounds, hold similar views, live in similar houses and go to similar plays. They dine, socialise and sleep together. Journalists often move to PR in mid-career and sometimes back again; a few work simultaneously in both camps. I’d reckon at least 90 per cent of newspaper content has had some PR or spin-doctor input. And newspapers employ PRs to plant favourable stories in other papers’.

It casts doubt as to whether Hobsbawm’s “data bank” contains “anything an averagely intelligent person couldn’t find in ten minutes on the web.”

Kampfner has a website archiving his abstract musings on travel, football and the media which tend to be of the ‘Why oh why’ variety. His work slots snugly into the template of most of the establishment press: he began his career with Reuters, then (recruited by Nigel Wade) joined The Daily Telegraph in 1990. On returning to the UK in the mid-1990s, biographies say he became Chief Political Correspondent at the Financial Times and political commentator for the BBC’s Today programme. He has also written for the Guardian and the Independent.

So far his work for Editorial Intelligence has been to tell us how great other people in Editorial Intelligence are.

The herd of independent minds

Kampfner is a member of an obscure religious sect. He is a believer in Robin Cook’s ‘ethical foreign policy’. One decorative use of this — its church if you like — was the Foreign Policy Centre (FPC), which has close ties to the intelligence services, is funded by mercenary companies (working in Iraq) and largely touts pro-war government propaganda: it is a broad church that welcomes onto its board individuals such as Anthony Bailey (who fronts for the BAe Systems and the Al Yamamah deal) whose donations to the party weren’t welcome until magically they were when the Labour party pot got low. Kampfner joined with John Lloyd and Stephen Twigg to reinforce the FPC’s line at the Fabian Society’s ‘Britishness’ Conference.

This came after a bit of a falling out over Lloyd’s promotion of the wholesale adoption of his beloved neo-conservatism — a religion not particularly known for either its ethics or shyness towards mass murder. Part of the gymnastics of those mysterious commentators who claim to be left-wing but hold no discernible left-wing views are that after their somersaults they must land on the side of whoever holds the reins of power.

Although he has written on the news management of the Iraq war by the US (kind of hard to avoid), in reviews Kampfner uncritically promotes both the FPC and the neo-conservative Lobbying organisation Centre for European Reform — both now run by Mark Leonard and both of which are massively engaged in ‘public diplomacy’, the CER was set up by David Miliband and Nick Butler of BP and the British American Project for a Successor Generation with an advisory board of Spooks, Lobbyists, and those who make a fortune out of the EU. The CER’s Charles Grant returns the reviewing favours by backslapping Kampfner in Prospect magazine, which specialises in this sort of thing. Here we read some of the mildest rebukes of Blair and indeed Mr Bush ever committed to paper:

“George Bush often displays a similarly Manichean worldview, which may be why the two men get on as well as they do. Both Bush and Blair are instinctive politicians who attach great importance to personal relationships.”

‘Yo Blair!’ Just like George and Tony’s special relationship, Kampfner favourably reviews Leonard (in the NS which he edits) to such an extent it is reproduced by the CER, (run by Leonard and Grant remember) and this all rather looks like mutual masturbation for those seeking a bit of objectivity from ‘journalists’.  Why Kampfner felt the need to join Editorial Intelligence when this sort of thing was his stock-in-trade is unclear: maybe he just wants to wallow in more of this kind of thing. You can even catch Leonard and Kampfner doing the rounds of Jewish Book Week — just like George and Tony again!

Kampfner also services the needs of the Institute for Public Policy Research to tread water over the UK’s arms sales: joining with Glenys Kinnock MEP (Lord Kinnock of Bedwetting is an IPPR trustee); the IPPR’s David Mepham (who used to work for Robin Cook]); Paul Eavis of Saferworld who works with International Alert, and who acts as an adjunct (perhaps unwitting) to BAe Systems PR ; and Keith Hayward, Head of Research, Royal Aeronautical Society and Associate and Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.

That pantomime cast was repeated at the 2003 Labour Party Fringe, sponsored by Hill & Knowlton, who spend a great deal of their time trying to start wars, this time with Derek Wyatt MP in the chair — Wyatt is also a member of Editorial intelligence — and Baroness Amos joining Glenys Kinnock, Paul Eavis and David Mepham. Kampfner was busy chairing another meeting with Brian Wilson MP and Geoffrey Robinson MP on the joys of nuclear power and another one on Iraq with Jack Straw and Clare Short.

Down Down — Deeper and Down

One of the more tedious aspect of the Blair/Brown saga perpetuated by writers like Kampfner, is the notion that Brown is some kind of left-wing Saviour, or measurably different, and that things, once again, can only get better. There is a paltry acquiescence and quietude about his work:

“In times of uncertainty, journalism of the left must not accept the status quo.”

We’ll look at that in context below, but first compare it to this from the Guardian:

“The third way has become the only mainstream way — the everything and the nothing.”

The process whereby Kampfner can imagine that (again along with Leonard etc.) fronting something like the Progress ‘national conference’ (introduced by the Rt. Hon Tony Blair MP and the Rt. Hon Peter Hain) isn’t Lord Acton’s corrupt establishment, is part and parcel of Kampfner’s mind set — the thing that keeps him cheerful—as in this example, from (yes) the Guardian:

“One of the great challenges of anyone who seeks change — journalist, politician or other — is to deal with anger and frustration, to know when to turn up the temperature and when not. Unlike the right, whose smugness is now greeted as a titillating post-political fashion statement, good journalism of the left (I apply the definition in its widest “liberal” context) must always challenge. It should never accept the status quo or take answers from officialdom at face value. In doing so, it lays itself open to some common criticisms: that it is obsessed by victimhood and blame culture; that it would never be satisfied, whatever is done; and — the most painful charge of all — that it is forever glum.”

Who is he talking to? After facilitating all those dreary conference advertisements for war by arm chair stealth bombers and massaging the think tanker’s private parts we get: No one should accept the status quo or take answers from officialdom at face value — toy with them first, write a thousand words or so, mull things over, give it a twist, try to look intelligent and then accept the status quo and answers from officialdom at face value. Get it right by studying the masters.

In several respects his work is a pointless read — a soft left so soggy and mildewed that it could switch to Cameron as needs be and few would notice. So bearing in mind the above mission statement, let’s have a look at the last paragraph of an interview with Patricia Hewitt:

“The leadership that both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been giving on these global issues, but now with Tony in particular around terrorism and the relationship between Islam and Muslim communities and the rest of the world, that leadership is superb.” One thing Patricia Hewitt cannot be accused of is failing to see the bright side.”

There is not much else to the piece. He just lets her ramble on in that passive aggressive nauseating tone without asking any questions. Here is the end of his interview with Gordon Brown:

“It is strange when politicians urge protesters to urge the politicians to do more, but that is the state of play as Gleneagles approaches. Brown heaps praise on Oxfam, Christian Aid, other non-governmental organisations and church groups, and – inevitably – Bono and Bob Geldof. He welcomes the forthcoming marches in Edinburgh and elsewhere, urging that they must be “properly stewarded” to ensure that “nothing happens which prevents us from focusing on the issues”. And he says: “Already what people have done and said outside mainstream political activity has made a huge difference. The changes wouldn’t have happened without the dialogue with NGOs. Millions of people have now taken up the issue. The challenge for Gleneagles is to build on what’s happened so far.””

That ‘interview’ was also basically a Brown soliloquy. And one more — the last paragraph of an ‘interview’ with David Miliband:

“There is something endearingly timeless about his politics. I suggest that, unlike many around Blair circa 1997, Miliband could not have been accused of trying to be fashionable. “I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of being faddish,” he says. “I’m more Marks & Spencer than Ted Baker.”"

Kampfner’s literary agent’s site lets slip the secret of why Kampfner’s is so friendly:

“On return to London, he joined the masonic world of the political lobby at Westminster”.

The Lobby Rules effectively prevent journalistic objectivity. The trade off for this — access — doesn’t seem to be worth it for the reader: OK, its a living for Kampfner, but why should we be so hobbled and purblind?

The coalition of the willing —to do it for a fee and expenses

Kampfner is part of a slightly larger clique than Editorial Intelligence, such as this BAPtastic gathering at The Fabian Society:

“Tim Garton Ash, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Ed Balls, Hazel Blears, Shami Chakrabarti, Nick Cohen, John Denham, David Edgar, David Goodhart, Tristram Hunt, Tessa Jowell, John Kampfner, Jude Kelly, Sadiq Khan, David Lammy, John Lloyd, Gordon Marsden, Shahid Malik, Ed Miliband, Fuad Nahdi, Tom Nairn, Trevor Phillips, Tariq Ramadan, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Zia Sardar, Ben Summerskill, Gisela Stuart, Stephen Twigg, and more…”

And Sadiq Khan wonders why he’s getting bugged. No doubt these conference zombies lectured everyone about democracy while clogging up the arteries of debate with their political cholesterol. Sometimes though, Kampfner gets tough (queue Butch voice over): ”January 2005, Power for a Purpose, a NS Special Issue by Kampfner and Peter Wilby”:

“As Tony Blair headed for a third election victory as Labour Party leader, John Kampfner and Peter Wilby “in a comradely spirit, offer him a draft manifesto, Power for a Purpose, designed to transform him into a proper social democrat while keeping his party in office.”

On they go with a hail of bullet points. But the reality here is that it was cobbled together from the same old sources, as revealed by his: “Thanks to the Institute for Public Policy Research, Social Market Foundation, Fabian Society and Demos for assistance.” And the truth is the Labour party didn’t really bother with a manifesto, perhaps no one had the stomach for it or it was just seen as a waste of money. Perhaps there was one and no one bothered to distribute it.

Kampfner rarely strays from the confines of this little coalition of the willing — and all this closeness causes some form of self-replication, like watching the parthenogenesis of some bacteria: such as the NS’s ‘Edge Upstarts’, yet another bright and breezy slightly queasy “KnowledgeBase” launching in 2006. The same old Demos, Social entrepreneur, Venture Philanthropy patronising tedium from the same old self-serving clique now posing as judges.

“It will be a database of information for anyone in the social enterprise or practical learning sectors — and something to which anyone will be able to contribute.” But Yasmin Alibhai-Brown will elbow you in the face and Shami Chakrabarti will bite your shins if you try to take their places on the fee-paying conference circuit.

Getting into bed with simple no-nonsense naked capitalism somehow isn’t good enough for these people who try to tart it up in the scant Lingerie of social concern. Their endless conferences (which destroy language), the staging of meaningless competitions, prize-givings designed to aggrandise those sitting in judgement — all form a type of game show junk politics. Their awards are presented by ‘Newly-appointed’ Minister for the ‘Third Sector’, Ed Miliband MP — really! we were hoping for Martin Mcguinness.

Kampfner’s fellow judges are Garry Hawkes the former chairman and chief executive of Gardner Merchant and director general of Sodexho Group , Nigel Kershaw of the Big Issue, “a leading social entrepreneur and advocate of social enterprises that offer business solutions to social problems.” Slave labour with a social conscience. The blurb also notes that “In 2005, The Big Issue’s UK editions generated £12m in cover sales with around £7m going directly to homeless and vulnerably housed vendors.” Spot the arithmetic discrepancy there. And here comes Demos’ Charles Leadbetter now puffed as “one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation and creativity in organisations”. Did he write — sorry innovate — that little blurb himself? It is used elsewhere.

Of course there’s the government: Hilary Norman, Director of the Social Enterprise Unit, “Hilary joined the DTI’s Small Business Service in September 2004 where she leads the implementation of the Government’s strategy for social enterprise.” You have to entertain these people for your money these days. Dancing down-and-outs how about that for a concept? And then there’s Demos’ M. T. Rainey. And lastly — it’s usually the guy from RTZ or Shell — here he comes: Stewart Wallis, “His career began in marketing and sales with Rio Tinto Zinc.”  Some time at the world bank perhaps? “He then joined the World Bank in Washington DC working on industrial and financial development in East Asia”. Read the full details in the New Statesman or new Social Enterprise. Later perhaps…

Although it is clear that Kampfner just cannot stray from these confines: somehow or other it is pretended that he does — here by the BBC:

“In Analysis this week, John Kampfner scours the election debate for clues why fear seems to play such a major role in the political battleground and asks whether appeals to insecurity and anxiety make people more or less likely to vote…”

And where has he scoured? That would be: “the think-tanks Demos, Migration Watch and Claire Fox’s The Institute of Ideas.” ALL ABOARD — Last stop Spooksville! But Kampfner is a versatile performer — he can also wear a green hat and get all environmental.

New face in Hell

Just as the meaning of the word ‘scoured’ is traduced above, Kampfner is part of the detritus of ‘the centre’ as rendered indistinguishable from the right in latter day Orwellian ‘nuspeak’ of NuLabour. This is all too apparent in a conference, organised by Compass, which — and no you are not experiencing deja vu — argues it has :

“speakers from a wide range of political opinions — including government ministers — such as Ed Balls MP, Derek Simpson of Amicus, Helena Kennedy MP, Jonathon Porritt, Hazel Blears MP, Stephen Twigg MP, Richard Sennett, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, Greg Dyke, Neal Lawson, Polly Toynbee, Jon Trickett MP, John Harris, Billy Bragg, Oona King, John Kampfner and Fiona Millar who’ll be joined by ministers, MPs, trade unionists and leading figures from across the democratic left and the wider progressive community.”

The organisations it involved include The Fabian Society, Renewal, Tribune, New Politics Network, The Co-operative Party, NUT, Electoral Reform Society, Age Concern, Liberty, Green Alliance, Amicus, Red Pepper, Shelter, Make Votes Count, IPPR, Soundings, Friends of the Earth, New Statesman, Unions 21, Citizenship Foundation, nef (new economics foundation), POWER, Centre for European Reform, Forum for the Future, Foreign Policy Centre, Fawcett Society, Demos, Centre for Global Governance, Young Foundation, and War on Want.

Venn diagram anyone? That type of line up is cloned on an identifiable circuit and its doublethink is openly reinforced and reproduced — ‘the centrepiece of the Progress annual conference on Saturday 15 October, which will be addressed by the prime minister, Tony Blair’ — to serve a very useful purpose; call it ‘social enterprise’ for those networking and looking for another gig or award or think tank or committee place or just simple loveable money.

But don’t be misled, there is strenuous debate amongst these people: think of the discussions over expenses and who sits where. Then there’s the awards.

Compass — little more than a PR astroturf venture — is orchestrated by Neal Lawson who was up to his usual tricks when he stated (sold the message) on the BBC’s coverage of the conference, that the word ‘left’, ‘suggests extremism’. Much the same routine as Paul Wilkinson’s use of the term ‘Human Rights Extremists.’ One presumes that everyone listed as attending is happy to go along with this sort of shall we say ‘deconstruction’: given it is people who are afraid of the people who are in abundance. Even nice little Shami Chakrabarti is now a member (governor) of the Ditchley Foundation (looks like all those appearances on Newsnight and Question Time have finally paid off) and she has also jumped into bed with the Centre for European Reform getting her picture taken alongside Uncle Paul Wilkinson.

Mein Kampfner

Kampfner toured the country promoting his book, ‘Blair’s Wars’ which is largely based on anonymous sources — no doubt the ‘silent majority’ settling old scores. The new edition was updated to include the Hutton Report, but surely this is Kampfner just stating the bleedin’ obvious:

“John Kampfner, alleges that Hutton, former lord chief justice of Northern Ireland, a man with “impeccable legal — and establishment — credentials,” had been specially selected by the government to head the inquiry, presumably in an effort to ensure a conclusion favouring the government. Kampfner reported that an unidentified “senior figure” with the government telephoned [Gavin] Davies, urging him not to cooperate with the inquiry. “Hutton was selected by the government,” the caller reportedly told Davies. “He is close to the security services and anti-BBC. It’s a trap.” Davies reportedly dismissed the warning. When the Hutton inquiry concluded, Kampfner wrote that Blair “knew the government had not just escaped censure, but had been completely exonerated. The BBC had been damned.””

Just about everyone mentioned here is “close to the security services” one way or another. As one reviewer put it (since there are quite a few of this sort of book he did it in a batch):

“Both books set out similar themes. On relations with the US neither book falls into the lazy cliché ridden trap of painting Blair as Bush’s poodle. Both highlight how Blairs determination to deal with Iraq and WMD preceded Bush’s election and became very much his own area of expertise. Kampfner notes that Blair was not dragged into war against Iraq. He was at ease with himself and his own beliefs. Blair appears to have been amongst the quickest of world leaders to come to terms with September 11th and think through how the Americans would react. But why then back the US over Iraq, and what deal was done and what influence did Blair think he could wield? Kampfner provides the most damning summing up of Blairs approach to Iraq, his other conflicts and foreign policy. It was a mixture of self-confidence and fear, of Atlanticism, evangelism, Gladstonian idealism his was a combination of naivety and hubris (p351).”

There is so little damnation there it actually imputes pure motives to Blair (a shyster’s shyster). This concept — that Blair ‘acted in good faith’ — is also the line that the FPC has put forward. Is this all they have left?

Why cling to this diaphanous illusion? The emperor has no clothes. Would Honest Tony, with all these ‘convictions’ have taken Britain to war without the USA? When did the UK’s doublethink from containment (under Clinton) to the hunting of WMD (a terminological device used specifically for Iraq) take place? Put it this way: what was Alistair Cambell doing with the Coalition Information Centre — they were forging intelligence. Diplomats lie and journalists believe those lies — that’s how wars are started.

“Playboy millionaire” Luke Johnson was an adviser to Editorial Intelligence (shoving off in 2007). He managed to get himself appointed as Chairman of Channel 4 with a salary of £67,500 a year. The appointment was arranged by Tessa Jowell who’s inside knowledge of how the media works comes from her connections to Silvio Berlusconi. Traders and analysts alike were left speechless as Ofcom, the ‘regulator’ of the media, hailed the entrepreneur’s “passion for public service broadcasting”.

Critics were amazed because of Johnson’s meagre track record in broadcasting and his reputation for being curt and abrasive with journalists. After Oxford he began with the Advertising Agency BMP, then as a media analyst (other reports say stockbroking analyst) with merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson. As the Chairman of Signature Restaurants (formerly Belgo Group, the business behind overpriced London restaurants such as The Ivy and Le Caprice) he became a figure of fun when he agreed, despite warnings from colleagues, to become a waiter as part of the ‘Back to the Floor’ TV show.

“After agreeing to take part in a BBC TV series on bosses working at the sharp end of their businesses. Luke Johnson was seen to rip off his microphone, told the film crew to “stick your TV programme” and stormed out of the kitchen. He also called the head chef a “whinger” at the Belgo Central restaurant in Covent Garden.”

What’s the point in going to Oxford and having all that money if you can’t bark out orders at the plebs forced to work for a living? But what is the point in him running a TV station given over to ‘Reality TV’ when he would prefer it if they were shoved somewhere with (one would presume) very low audience figures indeed?

Other directorships include the more down market PizzaExpress, My Kinda Town, American Port Services, Abacus Recruitment, Whittards of Chelsea and logistics business Nightfreight. He was the founder of an investment trust, Intrinsic Value, venture capitalists VCT and internet incubator fund NewMedia Spark. Which has possibly the most artless and annoying web site in the world. He is also a Governor of the London Institute, which represents five art and design Colleges.

Johnson is thought to have fallen out with his former executives at PizzaExpress including Hugh Osmond, his friend from university and the two goad and taunt each other to this day.

Luke’s gospel

Johnson is an occasional columnist for The Sunday Telegraph and his efforts are an exercise in mystifying capitalism Punting ‘The Psychic Investor’ — sort of day time TV gibberish for those looking for the killer formula for getting rich quick — the fact that big investments might be predicated on child slave labour in some copper mine in Africa is discreetly ignored, Hey, no one really knows how it all works:

“Frequently valuations and price movements have been impossible to justify on any sane basis…. As John Maynard Keynes once remarked: “Money is one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological properties which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.””

Typically the columns will review some on-the-make finance ‘guru’s’ collection of witless aphorism which bathe the vile snake pit of chicanery and inside information involved in City trading in soft soap. Ultimately people like Johnson are watched for what they do rather than what they say — such as when he picked up 750,000 shares in insurance group LIMIT which has been the subject of take-over speculation.

Johnson is a huge fan of globalisation in promoting ‘development’:

“Capitalism gives ordinary people hope — they too can become prosperous with hard work and a little luck. Capitalism breeds peace, because nations that trade together have too much to lose by fighting. For the proof of the last assertion, it is worth referring to the Human Security Report, a definitive study of world-wide conflicts published last year by the OUP. It documents the dramatic but largely unknown decline in the numbers of wars, genocides and human rights abuses over the past decade or so.”

Ardent capitalists have seized on this report, which was funded by five national governments and the Rockefeller Foundation. It says it is all the media’s fault for showing the bad side of things (watch out C4 news) and since the lapse in the cold war, “Washington and Moscow stopped fueling “proxy wars” in the developing world,” according to its author, Andrew Mack, former director of strategic planning in the executive office of troubled UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

How did Mack provide such a Enron-like statistical wonder? Easy: that which is conveniently designated as ‘international terrorism’ has been ruled out of the equation. So we can all crack on with merciless globalisation. The problems in untangling Afghanistan in the 80s and the trail of US support of the Mujahideen which led to Al-Qaeda can just be ignored. Also think of the ‘peace’ that Iraq suffered from 1991 till the invasion — that was probably worse than many wars. The Human Security Report smacks of propaganda.

Think Tank land

This loquacious rabidity might remind people of someone else, which we’ll get to later. Johnson was a speaker at the Bruges Group along with ‘the Hudson Institute’s’ Dr Irwin Stelzer (who these days argues for a kind of Keynesian donations to huge financial conglomorates who blew it), here Johnson was billed as the writer of ‘the acclaimed TaxPayers’ Alliance publication, The Bumper Book of Government Waste’, although he merely contributed the introduction. The pair repeated the double act at the Adam Smith institute.

Although he has an celebrated aversion to manual labour himself, Johnson is huge fan of China where “the Chinese work 24-7.” Yeah, and those working conditions are replicated in the dark side of the food industry such as the drowning of the cockle-pickers in Morecambe bay. While the Chinese neither eat, sleep or go to the lavatory: we in the UK are: “Hamstrung by preposterous regulations, high taxes, a burdensome welfare system and anti-business legislation.” After 30 years of the demolition of this? Where else would he find an audience for this guff but the Adam Smith Institute. Let’s see — a Channel 4 reality show: we strip Luke of his wealth, drop him naked in the middle of China, say good luck and come back in 20 years to see if he’s a millionaire.

His writing is along the lines of ‘I’m no expert but…” followed by some huge rambling treatise but, just like in ‘Back to the Floor’ it doesn’t take long for the image to crack:

“A huge con has been perpetrated on the British public in the past few years by the environmental lobby, helped by sensationalist media. Major industries such as food manufacturing and supermarkets have meekly gone along with this fraud. The eco-activists have convinced millions of rational people that “organic” food is healthy and good, and that genetically modified foods are dangerous, and headlines such as “Mutant Foods Set For School Dinners Ban” and irresponsible use of nonsense phrases such as ‘Frankenstein Foods’ have inflamed public opinion and hampered progress. The reality is that GM foods are one of the few hopes that the Third World has of ending hunger and deprivation. Superstition and ignorance among educated people in the West are preventing farmers in Africa from producing safer, more plentiful crops. That Britain has suffered more misinformation about GM foods than most countries is especially disturbing, since the UK is a world leader in the biotech industry, with over 500 public and private biotechnology organisations.”

Now where did that come from — the horses mouth you might say: Monsanto’s pretend information channel “The Knowledge Centre.”

How can you run food outlets and talk like this? In the world of PR and Spin perhaps Signature Restaurants could punt this line — “we keep all our pesticides freshly sprayed with DDT and wash nothing.” How about ‘Frankenstein Foods’ as the name of some new place in Notting Hill, stuffed full of all his yes-men who’ll never see the small print on the menu which says ‘may render you infertile.’ Johnson read medicine at Oxford but has moved away from issues of health to accentuate the moneymaking side of bio tech typified by Monsanto.

Johnson’s business interests range from the Greyhound Racing Association — which operates six dog tracks — to a chain of dental practices, the Strada and Giraffe restaurant chains (presumably not eating Giraffes but who knows), weight-loss clinics and bingo halls.
He is part of the rise of the private equity company — a return to the days of asset stripping.

Ai Karamba!

Now that he lords it over those who work for Channel 4, it will be the financial side of things Luke’s interested in — and how these concur with his own private interests. When the cameras are on him he will be a lot more of an enthusiastic defender of the Channel than his father, yes — the far right ‘polemicist’ Paul Johnson, who once memorably described a previous C4 chief executive, Michael Grade, as “Britain’s pornographer in chief”. But with a spanking new bottom on board people will no doubt be fully dressed at all times on Channel 4.

Like most ‘self-made’ entrepreneurs Daddy probably got him his first job — a spell at TV-AM as an assistant to his old pal Jonathan (CIA errand-boy) Aitken. Young Johnson’s view on his disgraced former employer is that he was “not nearly as wicked as some people like to portray him.” Good grief: is he worse?

There was also a brief period as the proprietor of Sunday Business , the perennially struggling newspaper. Journalists who worked there remembered his, once again, brusque manner. Months after he arrived, the newspaper was sold again.

Old Paul Johnson was a member of the Committee for a Free World which was thought to be an offshoot of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and back in the day its British membership was “as hoary a catalogue of reactionaries as you could wish not to meet,” and did its best to foment those proxy wars that dodgy report was on about.

“There is Sir James Goldsmith, Professor Julius Gould (author of the two ISC reports on the ‘Marxist infiltration of higher education’), Paul Johnson (Thatcher-loving former editor of the ‘New Statesman’), Richard Hoggart (recently deposed as chairman of that magazine), Robert Moss (the CIA’s Man in the Media, fanatical anti-communist columnist in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ and Goldsmith’s ‘Now” contributor to Forum World Features and the ISC, and council member of the Freedom Association, formerly of course the NAFF) and his media colleague Peregrine Worsthorne. Rubbing shoulders with this lot are …Stephen Haseler, SDA co-founder and co-expellee Douglas Eden, renegade Labour MPs Mike Thomas and Neville Sandelson, and, of course, without whom no such list can be complete, Frank Chapple.”

And the US version was chaired by Mr Human Security himself, the young Donald H. Rumsfeld. Its about time young Johnson joined some dodgy think tank himself, and that, of course, would be Editorial Intelligence, but there will be plenty more to come.

When Peter Cook was asked ‘did he have any regrets in life?’ he replied: ‘saving David Frost from drowning.’ The opposite seems to be the case with Barney Jones who devised, piloted and produced ‘Breakfast With Frost’ for far too long. Although the programme was not without tough choices right from the start:

“When David agreed to present the new weekly show, the first thing to settle was the title. After The Frost Report, Frost over America, Frost on Sunday and David Frost presents, there was clearly one prerequisite. Thus Breakfast with Frost was born, and a show that has generated more clips on TV and more newspaper headlines than any other news programme on British television embarked on what was to be a 12 year run.”

But what was in these rehashed clips? A show so anodyne it was used like in-house PR and played like a violin by a train of politicians so that it rarely ascended beyond its own satirical parodies. Jones is the fellow who did the behind the scenes deals to get the stars to plonk down their behinds knowing they could expect Q&As as comfy as the sofa.

Starting a media career as Director of Communications for the National Union of Students (what is it about the NUS?) after graduating he joined the BBC in 1984 as a reporter based at the House of Commons (the same time as Andrew Marr), then worked on Newsnight, the TV news, Breakfast News and the 1992 General Election.

“Career highlights include setting up a joint interview with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, getting Elton John into the studio the morning after he played Candle in the Wind at Princess Diana’s funeral, and getting Nelson Mandela dancing in the Breakfast With Frost studio at the end of his interview.”

What were the lows one wonders. But it is all change now: Jones is the producer of Sunday AM, presented by Andrew Marr. Both Marr and Frosty are not exactly infamous for asking penetrating questions. To fill this void Jones seems as star struck as the autograph hunters outside Broadcasting House. His memoir of the heady days of Frost are more Elton, Diana, ‘Becks and Sven’ (first name terms you see).

No, these programmes are actually synonymous with not asking questions and of foisting on us a deference towards politicians which is not shared by the majority of the viewers and contributes almost nothing to a greater political understanding. But there are exceptions here such as Marr’s interview with crazy Noam Chomsky, wherein the news media itself was discussed:

“Marr: How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are…

Chomsky: I don’t say you’re self-censoring — I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying; but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

Marr has contributed to Editorial Intelligence with his usual gravitas, offering a valuable insight “on needing a shower before he writes a column.” Read it and weep Chomsky. But who can forget those high points in Marr’s programme, such as the the time (Sunday, 2 July 2006) when, trying to leave, old George Soros put his arse was in front of the camera while Marr’s head repeatedly bobbed behind him to the left and right, trying to find the camera in what looked frighteningly sexual. Eventually Soros shuffled away to stroke his Persian cat as Marr told us we were now going to hear the Bonzo Dog Do-dah band — one feels the ghost of Vivian Stanshall was in the room.

Jones is more at home as part of the incessant handing over of large perspex obelisks as a judge of either BT’s Press and Broadcast Awards or The Royal Television Society’s which has offices next to EI’s Dominic Fry’s PR company Tulchan. At a time when appalling numbers of journalists are being killed and murdered in the Iraq war and the truth media-managed out of the picture, there is something slightly lunatic about award ceremonies — best obfuscation in a political interview…best pause in a handover…best ‘and finally’ penguin story…fastest scrolling info bar.

After hearing that Jones had joined Editorial Intelligence the BBC ‘forced’ him and Kirsty Lang to quit the EI advisory board. This was not so much a value judgement rather, it was predicated on the fact that they would be paid £1,000 to hold the position and £200 to attend its seminars. As if the BBC wasn’t ravaged by this sort of thing. Now, Elton you have a new single out. To finish is a link to a round up of who rounded up the papers on the show which contains quite a few from the EI gang: Matthew D’Ancona, John Kampfner (and an awful lot of Sarah Sands, and way too much Amanda Platell, Carol Thatcher and Glenys Kinnock).

Henry’s House is a recent PR firm owned by Editorial Intelligence’s Julian Henry and ‘pop svengali’ Simon Fuller the man who ‘gave us’ the Spice Girls. The ‘shite they shovel’ — as they say in PR — include effervescent S Club 7 and the chemicals diluted with water called ‘Tango’, or is that the other way around. The firm says it tries to keep a balance between showbiz and ‘brand clients,’ although Henry says that the methods behind selling unwanted stars and unwanted products are much the same.

“People relate to talent and consumer brands in similar ways; the most successful celebrities are marketed as brands… The needs of a celebrity will be different to that of a brand, but the principles for the communication work tend to be the same.”
But people are forced to relate — one cannot escape this muzak of the madhouse.

Its current client list is a depressing array of jaded showbiz wonders such as Johnny Vaughan, Jamie Theakston, Pop Idol’s Will Young and Gareth Gates and Annie Lennox together with ‘consumer brand clients’ like Orange (you try selling that in Northern Ireland), Absolut Vodka, The Face and FHM. They say they have an overall turnover of £2.5 million, others put it at £1.2m— that’s PR for you.

This casual dehumanisation is reflected in terms such as “entertainment properties” (that’s the stars — old time pop managers used to call them ‘the meat’). No the soul is not much in evidence here — it is the beep of the cash register that is music to Henry’s ears.

They say “Since launching in 1999 we have become one of the UK’s top performing PR agencies” but who would believe such inveterate hucksters? They have no qualms about working with Coca-Cola, or the huge combines, Sony, BMG and others, but rather like Smashy and Nicey: “The company has an environmental programme, supports sustainable working practices and donates 10% of its profits to charity.”

Think of even the basic logistics of producing a can of Coke: the whole process, starting at digging out and smelting the bauxite in some mine in Australia, the rolling processes to the manufacture of the can, its design and printing of its label, making and filling it with the actual gunk and finally getting it to the shops and then a refrigerated machine turned on 24/7. A team of researchers from the Cardiff Business School said it took 319 days. Most of which was storage and transport. The journey of one single container ship can involve a hundred people: the logistics planners, insurance brokers, dockers, haulage drivers, warehouse workers, customs officers and so on. For what?

Henry’s environmental programme

What kind of environment have Henry’s House created? Most of their claims to fame-building come across as being thin and incestuously related: They did PR for Virgin and Big Brother then — “We arranged for Goldie Lookin’ Chain to pose at our Virgin Mobile kebab van to raise awareness of the Virgin Mobile customer only gigs.” They have “represented Will Young since the beginning of his career” and “We have promoted two series of the award winning TV show Pop Idol to UK TV audiences”. “We launched Johnny Vaughan’s breakfast show for Capital FM”: how many cheeky chapie, bright and breezy chatathons can the air waves sustain.

Their own PR is an patent fabrication of their worthiness. Their site argues that: “We made the Schweppes ‘You Know Who’ advertising campaign famous by generating over £800k worth of press coverage,” although that particular campaign has been going since the 70s.

They argue: “We are specialists in media relations and well connected at all levels through print, broadcast and online media channels.” And that’s the problem with all this slurry — its much the same process as feeding battery chickens each other and their own shit, and as entertaining to watch. The need for PR gibberish: ‘Guerilla PR strategies,’ ‘Design of ambient matter,’ ‘Advertiser funded programming’, ‘Product placement’, is just a way of ignoring the outcome.

ICA commercial opportunity

Henry has gone to the lengths of demonstrating his own brand cultural ignorance in the newspapers:

“What is it with these modern artists? There was a time — around 130 years ago I guess — when painters such as Vincent van Gogh would wander the streets unrepresented by commercial agents and PR people, and as a result their work would stand or fall on its artistic merit.”

Not quite — Vincent’s brother Theo was a well connected art dealer who tried everything. They didn’t sell because he met people like Henry who prefer to sell cultural shite and don’t give two French Connection UK’s about art. What further evidence of cultural ignorance and wilful blindness could we want other than the fact that he is a member of the ICA council — if there was no money in it none of these people would hang around the art world, just like in van Gogh’s day. Tedious as it is (with its predictable puffs) his article does give some insight into the notion that he knows PR is a parasitical con:

“Most of the major PR agencies in the UK construct their business around writing strategies, drawing up Q&As, drafting positioning statements, scripting advertorials, collating briefing packs, printing press kits and countless other bits of waffle that underpin our daily trade. This rationalising process gets charged to the clients, who in most cases seem happy to pay for it as they have been told that these are necessary building blocks in the construction of the great PR event.”

Everyone knows PR people know what they are doing is heinous. But one thing eats away at Henry — people’s response to the stinking effluent he pumps out, it seems they avoid him like the beggars in the street.

“The only annoying thing is when journalists have a pre-conceived notion that a PR man is the devil, and we are not worthy of sitting at the same table as them. There are fewer narrow-minded journalists now, but it is annoying when some people do not seem to realise that we have anything valid to contribute to a news story or debate.”

No — the devil had all the good tunes. This is one of the guys who represents Victoria Beckham. People just see his work as minor part of a supply chain of utterly superfluous, ultimately meaningless, degrading, deceitful, sad, soulless, exploitative pollution which is ruining the cultural environment. But he wants to be loved. Someone should strap him down and play every contestant from Pop Idol for the rest of his life (drip fed on Tango and Coke) and then just before he expires remove the headphones and ask — ‘do you see what we’re on about now?’ Who knows it might encourage a momentary change of heart. Or is that already a new game show?

Tony Halmos is an advisor to Editorial Intelligence and the Director of Public Relations for the Corporation of London. He has been in this post since 1994. From 1987-88 he was Press Secretary to Rt Hon David Steel MP and prior to that, from 1982-88, he held various positions within the Social Democratic Party, ending as National Organiser. He was Educated at Cardiff High School, Wadham College, Oxford and the University of Illinois, USA, and lives in South London.

His work for the Corporation of London concentrates on promoting the City as the “world’s leading international financial centre and Europe’s financial capital.” So Halmos does not look out for the ordinary Londoner — he is more concerned with the interests of, as the Sunday Times put it:

“The exclusive coterie of men who rule the City of London according to conventions laid down in medieval times… at least 21 of the 25 aldermen attended top public schools including Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Radley, Haileybury, Rugby and Stowe. They are drawn from some of the most prestigious City names, including Rothschilds and Linklaters & Paines. The City was the only local authority allowed to keep its aldermen when they were abolished elsewhere in 1972. Aldermen wine and dine regularly at the Mansion House, home of the lord mayor of London, and at Guildhall, the official headquarters. They rub shoulders with prime ministers and ministers, not only from Britain, but from abroad. Each alderman gets a turn as lord mayor, for which he is given the use of two Rolls-Royces, travel expenses and the right to live in the Mansion House . There are 230 lunches, dinners and banquets each year at the Mansion House, which has extensive wine cellars and 37 staff.”

Halmos has though, presided over the PR concerning the minute reforms of the system that had been largely unchanged since the 1850s.

He is a council member of Institute of Public Relations’s Corporate and Financial Group and was awarded an IPR Fellowships in May 2002 — the same time as Editorial Intelligence’s Julia Hobsbawm and Dominic Fry.

Halmos took part in a Foreign Policy Centre meeting on UK-EU-China Policy Dialogue at the Treasury, Downing Street and (of course) the Guildhall for yet one more banquet. Speakers included: Sir Michael Butler, Sir David Clementi (Chairman of Prudential), Lord Hannay of Chiswick, Charles Leadbeater, Mark Leonard, Sir Peter Middleton (Chairman of Barclays Bank). Participants included Nick Butler (BP), Peter Mandelson MP, Geoff Mulgan and Will Hutton.

This was part of diplomatic efforts to welcome China with open arms(sales) and which prevented any dissent shown on the streets of London and a Public Diplomacy exercise ignoring past denunciations of the political reality in China. Halmos had previously (1989 –1994) been Associate Director in the Public Affairs section of Hill and Knowlton. His time there included two secondments: one to Hong Kong where he was the Campaign Co-ordinator for the Honour Hong Kong Campaign for full British passports for Hong Kong people (why they didn’t use the slogan ‘only the wealthy were welcome’ is anyone’s guess); and the other to the Water Association where he was public affairs, press and information officer in the run up to privatisation of the industry.

Halmos worked closely with GPC Market Access who, according to a (2000) Brand republic article “covered lobbying and information gathering on local government issues” for the Corporation of London and the article describes the world of EU lobbying:

The British Bankers Association sends ’a regular stream’ of its executives over to Brussels. In addition, it employs PR firm European Public Policy Advisers to collect ’soft intelligence’ – available only to those who are in Brussels, picking up ideas that are floated rather than written down.

Halmos is quoted in connection to the ’ISDN directive’, which “threatened the routine City practice of taping employees’ telephone conversations. Taping is used to help prevent financial fraud such as insider dealing.” And the report also tells us of the creation of “a new City regulator, the Financial Services Authority. It is taking over from the Securities and Investments Board and (to some extent) from the Bank of England.” Other (1998) reports state that Shandwick handled the UK public affairs for the Corporation, and that in 2003 the Corporation re-appointed Weber Shandwick UK with vice-chairman Lord Tom McNally (now leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords) as its public affairs counsellor following a review of its lobbying needs. The re-organisation was overseen Halmos and according to the a (1998) Independent report this was the time when (Editorial Intelligence’s) Colin Byrne was the former Labour head of information under Peter Mandelson. The article explores the merry-go-round of PR people riding along with ‘New Labour’ arms companies and PR outfits:

Michael Craven Was Managing Director of Market Access International, now GPC Market Access. Left last week after a takeover. Worked for John Prescott in the 1980s. MAI clients included arms manufacturers Alvis, Racal and Siemens, leading genetic engineering firms Novartis and Zeneca and the League Against Cruel Sports. Mike Lee Director of Westminster Strategy. Worked for David Blunkett. Other staff include Jo Moore, former Labour press officer, and Howard Dauber, former chair of the Young Fabians. Recent clients include Sema Group UK Ltd, the Chemical Industries Association, the England and Wales Cricket Board and English National Opera. Josh Arnold-Foster Just employed by Politics International. In opposition worked for defence spokesmen Martin O’Neill and David Clark, and also for Bruce George, current chair of the Defence Select Committee. Also worked for Denis Healey and Doug Hoyle, now Lord Hoyle, former Chair of PLP. Recent clients include BP, and Virgin Rail.

Which all seems rather quaint, but all this talk of GPC Market Access, lobbying, ’soft intelligence’ and taping phone calls may remind some readers of Greg Palast’s work. One name missing is Editorial intelligence’s Derek Draper who, from 96-99, was a director of lobbying firm GPC Market Access and who offered the ‘soft intelligence’ that:

“There are 17 people who count in this government, and to say I am intimate with all of them is the understatement of the century.”

A ‘light touch’

Halmos is the author of a Public Affairs News Article entitled London:Sterling work where he describes his role as Director of Public Relations for the Corporation of London and ensuring that the London remains the best place in the world to do business — ‘no questions asked’…there’s another slogan Tony.

Tony’s world was commented upon by his fellow Editorial Intelligence (they prefer e.i. which looks like an inversion of i.e. — sort of ‘is that’) pundit Peter York (known by other names). This was back in 2007 and starts with:

That snowy Thursday, the morning of the e.i/FT/City of London/Cass Business School/British American Project discussion “The City versus Wall Street: Who’s Ahead?” my own newspaper, The Independent, had “Spend, Spend, Spend” as its high-drama cover-line. It was a London story, about the extraordinary order of money that was being earned and spent in the capital. There were billionaires, oligarchs and property prices of course. But above all it was about The City and the life that fed on it. City salaries and bonuses – the £4 bn. being handed out this spring – and the success that underwrote them. The success that meant London, on a number of crucial indices, was moving ahead of New York as the world’s No. 1 international financial centre.

Comment could be made on the role of the British American Project but the essay asks ‘Does London believe it’s own hype?’ and the tone is a bit like a school magazine produced in the 1970s trying to copy the NME:

“Julia Hobsbawm, e.i’s legendarily reclusive founder [...] Lionel Barber, the youthful – looking”… and so on, but Tony Halmos’ presentation seemed almost prescient:

Tony Halmos led off, giving a measured view of what had really happened. The recent McKinsey report (commissioned by Mayor Bloomberg we were told) on New York’s financial future had provoked ‘panic on Wall St’ headlines and London clearly was doing well, but don’t let’s go mad. What was really happening was long-term and global, a shift in the centre of gravity as capital markets diversified.

And you can’t get a bigger centre of gravity than a black hole. But this prescient tone fades as York adds:

New York, Halmos continued swiftly, isn’t exactly down-and-out. The Sarbanes-Oxley requirements were certainly a problem compared to our ‘light touch’ regime, but Mayor Bloomberg had treated it as a wake-up call and New Yorkers were pretty responsive types. And there were still challenges for London, particularly our infrastructure and the constant need for a better trained workforce.

Not any more! But it is York who gets the prize for punditry (the science of talking about what you know nothing of): “In London all investment bankers had to do was hold out a bucket to catch the flow of gold.” The gold colored substance filling up their buckets in late 2008 is self produced, but then York’s incontinence yields this sparkling stream: “There was an arcane question – meaning I couldn’t understand it – from a hedge-fund man about regulation.” Yeah man — who’s interested in all that stuff, it doesn’t affect us: the world doesn’t have to make sense, it only has to make money eh? York’s essay also gives us a taste of the general attitudes amongst city people to the lesser beings who inhabit the planet:

Everyone else chorused that it didn’t matter in the least who owned the assets. The tax take from all that activity was huge (does it pay for us to have Birmingham as a pet?)

Expert textpert choking smokers / Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?

In ‘Sterling work‘ written for Public Affairs Magazine, Halmos initially puts the emphasis on all the other things the City of London Corporation does apart from all that lovely money:

it also runs its own police force, and the nation’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. It provides five Thames bridges, three wholesale food markets (Billingsgate, Spitalfields and Smithfield), the famous Barbican Arts Centre and a host of facilities beyond the City boundaries – for example, open spaces such as Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath.

But two things recur in the essay “regular contact with government” and the notion that ‘legislation’ and ‘regulation’ feature highly and that they ‘work regularly with the mayor’. How on earth could things have gone so wrong with Boris Johnson on the case? Now obviously much fun can be had looking back at all the things Halmos has said and the people he his associated with and the mess they have made of capitalism. But we shall focus on this briefly before moving back to Halmos’ trans-Atlantic links and the networks they reveal.

On December 11, 2007, U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions David G. Nason gave a talk before the City of London Corporation called “Redesigning U.S. Financial Regulation for a Global Marketplace,” this was prefaced by the acknowledgement that two months before in New York City, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. met with City of London officials, Policy and Resources Committee Chairman Michael Snyder, Assistant Director of Economic Development Paul Sizeland, and Director of Public Relations Tony Halmos, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to discuss the global competitiveness of the financial services industry. This began with the opening remark that:

“A common theme in my remarks today is that capital markets are no longer confined to geographical or national boundaries.”

That type of statement is meaningless given that both British and American banks claim such a confined nationality for the purposes of being bailed out. The talk did highlight what most commentators already knew:

A housing market correction, rooted in an eight-year period of exceptional housing price appreciation, remains the most serious risk to future economic growth.

But adds this, note the middle sentence:

Our efforts will not be designed to assist speculators who acquired real estate for investment purposes. We must endeavor to avoid bailing out lenders and investors, who should recognize the value of these impaired mortgages and should not expect government assistance in these commercial transactions. Lastly, the government should not subject lenders and investors to abrogation of bargained-for contractual rights.

It talked directly of the sub-prime scam adding that “a set of guidelines to streamline the process of refinancing and modifying subprime loans for able homeowners [...] estimates up to 1.2 million subprime adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) borrowers will be eligible for fast-tracking into affordable refinanced or modified mortgages under this streamlined approach.” At this point the borrowers and lenders were the little people and a “market-based approach” seemed a perfectly reasonable way the keep the shuck alive:

The issues in the mortgage market highlight the challenges we as policymakers see with the constant evolution and innovations in our global capital markets. On the one hand, the complexity of the global and securitized mortgage market made it more difficult for the private sector to help homeowners modify their mortgages. On the other hand, this financial innovation increased access to credit and brought the dream of homeownership to a greater number of people than ever. Capable borrowers with less-than-perfect credit histories found opportunity through the ingenuity of our capital markets. So we must be careful that any response to this situation does not unnecessarily harm those borrowers or stifle beneficial financial innovation.

Sub-prime, securitization and the other black box scams being ‘financial innovation’, as for regulation the speaker was for it, indeed felt it had been done sufficiently:

…Secretary Paulson has asked the Treasury Department to undertake a comprehensive review of financial institutions regulation and to develop recommendations to modernize our regulatory system. We expect this review to be complete by early next year.

So the market collapse we see now in late 2008 is after the regulation has happened. For (the Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions) David G. Nason the working assumption is that “in this new globalized marketplace, we are engaged in a race-to-the-top, to achieve the optimal regulatory structure for the financial services industry.” he even says “we are witnessing the evolution and testing of various regulatory structures for the financial services sector”. He provides the New Labour example of “separating bank supervision and monetary policy and consolidating financial services supervision under the umbrella of a single regulator” as an example of this evolution.

Halmos is of course only involved in PR and that does not involve actually selling people something they don’t want — well it does but the point is that is at a remove, it is about greasing the wheels for others to sell things (that people do not want) and image, reputation, persuasion and negotiation. And it is hard work — not everyone can skillfully manage an expense account. Guto Harri, a former BBC Chief Political Correspondent, recently appointed Communications Director (or spin doctor) for the Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s administration at London City Hall, was taken to lunch by Halmos on 17/07/2008 at Magdalen in Tooley Street, according to his Gifts and hospitality register. This is astounding —normally he is taken to the Gaucho, Tower Bridge. Harri had a brief stint at public affairs firm Fleishman-Hillard beforehand and is another example of the interchangeable merry-go-round of independent journalists/PR/spin doctors that provide the spectacle of ‘news’ that the public has to put up with. Nevertheless for those using the web to go beyond these confines “Lunch” and “Tony Halmos” is a reasonably good search term for finding out what PR for the Corporation entails. But what might the two be discussing privately away from the public they serve — if you forgive the pun —we are left in the realm of speculation but a little while later a few details started to leak out to the press about The City of London Corporation’s pledge of £200million funding for Crossrail project, and to lead efforts to raise another £150million from business by 2016. It has underwritten £50 million of these extra funds but £100 million remains unguaranteed. A post Magdalen-lunch Evening Standard report of 07/08/08 stated:

“Private contributions could be unforthcoming if London sees a crash.” But Tony Halmos, the corporation’s director of public relations, said he was confident of bringing in the funds.

£3.5 billion is to be raised from a special levy on London businesses, £2.7billion to be borrowed on the back of future rail fares and £ 5.1billion from the Government. Interestingly Halmos seems to have led the reform of the voting system in the City.

The Times in their ‘Court & Social section’ tell us he is associated with the Pilgrim Society of the United States and the English-Speaking Union. The Pilgrims Society has puzzled researchers and has been around for quite some time, establishing ‘Atlanticist’ links. On the one hand it is presented as an informal innocent gathering for simple chat and for others part of a sub-culture stemming from Cecil Rhodes’ Milner Round Table Group. Some of the material which surrounds its description is Illuminati-obsessed conspiracy theory, but there are a few interesting (and quite conspiratorial) characters involved in the English Speaking Union who point to the idea that much of Atlanticism seems to operate covertly (and here it may be useful to remind the reader that Halmos was the Social Democratic Party’s National Organiser):

Joseph Godson, in an active retirement, was also organizing European initiatives for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the proselytising think-tank which funded the author of the SDP/Liberals joint policy statement in 987[sic]. He combined that with running US government-funded educational visits for British trade unionists and editing 35 Years of NATO (Dodd, Mead, 1984) a transatlantic symposium on ‘the changing political, economic and military setting’, funded by Rupert Murdoch’s Times and introduced by its then editor Charles Douglas- Home and NATO secretary general Peter Carrington. Godson’s foremost British associate in this CSIS/NATO work was SDP founder member Alan Lee Williams, a former Labour MP and junior defence minister who was treasurer of the European Movement from 1972 and 1979. From his office as director of the English Speaking Union he had chaired Godson’s Labour and Trade Union Press Service operation and, with the renewed rise of CND in the late 1970s, had become a central figure in the government-funded Peace Through NATO.

The source for this seems to be Tom Easton’s Who were they travelling with? From Lobster 31, from my perspective Godson’s and Alan Lee Williams’ activities looks like part of David Abshire’s public diplomacy operation ‘Project Democracy’. Abshire was Special Counselor to President Reagan and the U.S. Ambassador to NATO (1983-1987) and founded the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1962. Halmos also worked as an assistant organiser “of organisation and industrial relations” for the TUC in 1978, before joining Hill & Knowlton in 1989-94 via the SDP which he joined in 1982 as National organiser and local government officer. Would this have been of interest to Lee Williams and Godson? Halmos is a Committee member of the The Jamestown 2007 British Committee, along with Lord Carrington the former Secretary-General of NATO mentioned above. Other Jamestown members are Robert H. Tuttle, United States Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, Lord Watson the Chairman of Burson Marsteller Europe, Michael Macy Cultural Affairs Officer, Embassy of the United States, Lord Powell, Simon Walker Director of Corporate Affairs at Reuters Group formerly Communications Secretary to the Queen, Lord Williamson formerly Secretary General of the European Commission, now head of the European Secretariat in the British Cabinet Office, Sir Robert Worcester the Founder of MORI and Chairman of the Pilgrim Society.

But what is the Pilgrims Society? What is its relation to The English-Speaking Union (ESU) and other groups such as The Jamestown Committee, at first we see much the same people and a high level of funding from the US Embassay and The British-American Parliamentary Group, The Jamestown committee is also funded by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation which receives generous funding from Northrop Grumman — the “leading provider of government information technology systems and mission-critical systems for the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.” the Foundation also organises high-level conferences such as the Forum on the Future of Democracy, which featured former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton and former Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

The The English-Speaking Union (ESU) is, according to its website, an international charity founded in 1918 to promote “international understanding and friendship through the use of the English language.” Its its ‘headquarters’, are at Dartmouth House, and it is led by the Director-General Mrs Valerie Mitchell.

The ESU conforms to a basic public diplomacy pattern — organising exchanges mostly of a trans-Atlantic nature with some sort of social Darwinism at its root, an overwhelmingly elite orientation, partnerships with corporate members, sponsors government and some form of interface with the secret service (now increasingly openly), and a Jesuitical focus on the young. It should be pointed out that the type of ‘English’ they are talking about is not the language most people in the UK speak—it is that which pronounces ‘The Rolling Stones’ as “The Railing Stains”. When explaining itself to ‘Johnny Foreigner’ it harks back to the memory of some golden age of Empire:

The English-Speaking Union was launched at the end of the First World War with the aim of promoting closer ties between the English Speaking peoples. It was founded by Sir Evelyn Wrench and one of its first Chairman was Sir Winston Churchill whose own command of English changed the course of history.

The same source tells us that the ESU has been graced by such masters of clarity of language as: The Hon Ronald Reagan, The Hon Dr Henry Kissinger and although it tries to ally itself to all this ponderous greatness with actual activities such as “the coveted silver National Mooting Competition Mace” the more suitable analogy would be Monty Pythons. Its work is some remnant of empire, clutching at the commonwealth with those outside of London-based power structures who act as satellites providing most of the comedy. The Scottish wing of the organisation provides biographies of its members and speakers: Sir John Bond — Chairman of Vodafone Group Plc and a non-executive director of Ford Motor Company and David Crystal, a professor of language whose web site’s ‘The Fight for English‘, seems to bristle with envy over the success of Lynee Truss’ ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves”:

“but does reading a usage manual help, if you have some language difficulties? the sad fact is: not much.”

That is fine as far as it goes by Crystal is the author of stacks of these books and his web site still punts them the latest being ‘A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics’, does that say on the dust jacket “not much use” . Other members include Sir Richard Billing Dearlove KCMG, OBE: known (or rather unknown) as ‘C’ (in memory of Mansfield Cumming) of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) until his retirement in July 2004. As Director of Finance, Administration and Personnel he also oversaw the move of SIS into its Headquarter Building at Vauxhall Cross in 1994— no one really knows how much that cost. ‘C’ recently took up the Mastership of Pembroke College Cambridge and was a member of the International Advisory Board of AIG and senior Adviser to the Monitor Group where he made a bigger mess of things than the costs of Vauxhall Cross. The SIS connection is enhanced by Sir Christopher Meyer and The Rt. Hon. Lord Robertson and Baroness Smith of Gilmorehill, Sir David Green KCMG was appointed Director General of the British Council in July 1999 now part of Wilton Park.

other ESU governors are The Lord Watson of Richmond CBE Chairman of CTN (Corporate Television Networks) and Chairman of the Coca-Cola European Advisory Board and connects the Pilgrims Society to the ESU, and the same could be said of Sir Robert Worcester, a Governor of the English Speaking Union, is the Founder of MORI, Ditchley Foundation, a member of the Media Standards Trust and of the European Atlantic Group — Anthony Westnedge OBE of the European Atlantic Group is also a member of ESU.

Good journalism
If he is to be believed Halmos, as Director of Public Relations at City of London Corporation, along with Canary Wharf plc, sponsored the 2008 Journalism Summer School, the reason being that:

“This summer school encourages new journalists and good journalism. Journalists provide a vital source of independent information. It’s what they publish and broadcast which informs the public about the world around them and enables them to play the role of active participants in democratic life.”

According to the site that promotes it, the Journalism Summer School:

was initiated by online magazine, spiked, in 2006, and is run by Journalism Education, a not-for-profit company. It was set up in response to a Times Higher Educational Supplement and Sutton Trust report which demonstrated the inequality in the media today. It showed that while 7% of the population is educated privately, 50% of top journalists working in the UK went to private school; very few were educated at state comprehensives.

The Times was the media partner and media organisations that held workshops or tours were given as: Spiked, the News of the World, the Sunday Times, Thomson Reuters, BBC, Sky and Closer magazine. The “high-profile figures in the media, who all participated on a voluntary basis” included: Tony Evans, Football Editor, The Times, Cosmo Landesman, Film Critic, The Sunday Times, Dean Piper, Entertainment Editor, Closer magazine and Richard Lawson, Award-winning Broadcast Journalist, BBC World Service. Other sources say thatthe people involved were Daniel Finkelstein, comment editor of the Times; Hannah Perry, new editor of Heat; Jenny Davey, business contributor of The Sunday Times; and Nick Davis, community affairs reporter at Radio Five Live.

‘Spiked’ is part of the ‘Institute of Ideas’ and operates out of Living Marxism’s old offices in Farringdon Road in London. ‘LM’, was a reincarnation of Living Marxism, the monthly review of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). A number of incongruities emerge here and some readers may feel that the City of London Corporation working along with the Revolutionary Communist Party’s remnants may not be conducive to Public Relations at its best in these trying times; or that the News of the World and Closer magazine are not that interested in “good journalism”, “independent information” or active participation in “democratic life”, they might percieve other more over-riding agendas dictating to these publications and the Murdoch empire.

The idea behind the project is that state school pupils come to Canary Wharf “to learn the art of journalism in a bid to “redress the class balance” in the profession” and the lucky winners get to write for ‘spiked’.